P: New AI-powered Lens Blur (Early Access) available across all surfaces.

[Rikk Flohr: Photography]

This post applies to Camera Raw, Lightroom Classic & the Lightroom Ecosystem products.

The Lightroom team is sharing an early look for AI-powered Lens Blur–giving you the ability to apply optical blur on any image regardless of how it was taken. Lens Blur is now available to try on all Lightroom surfaces.

How does Lens Blur work?

• Lens blur applies a depth-based blur effect, similar to what can be achieved with real-world optical lenses, by using AI-generated or device-captured depth data (when available).
• Lens blur will automatically prioritize focus for the detected subject, but you can also interactively adjust the focus distance. Precise focus range tuning is also available (currently desktop only: Lightroom Desktop, Lightroom Classic, and Camera Raw).
• You can also further customize the Bokeh shapes, highlight Boost (desktop only), and make depth map refinements (desktop only).

Will my Lens Blur adjustments on one surface be synced to other surfaces? I.e. mobile to web to desktop, and vice versa?

• Yes, all edits will sync. To revert settings, you can go back to previous versions or history steps, or un-apply Lens Blur settings.

Can I add Lens Blur settings to my presets?

• No, presets and copy + paste workflows are not currently enabled for Lens Blur during Early Access.

For more information, please check out Lens Blur. 

Please give it a try and share feedback in this thread as we continually improve this feature.

Lisa Ngo: Lightroom Product Manager

Current Popular Lens Blur Feature Requests:

• Add Noise Option
• Custom Bokeh

Stop by and give them a vote if they're of interest to you!

Posted by: 

[Darlene25947236tt1k]

I tried Lens Blur on two photos. The first one didn't have much effect --maybe, it was the visual depth.  But, the second one came out fantastic and I really thought it improved the image.  I liked what it did on the second one.  

[Ricard32959588op29]

Fantástica herramienta, felicidades.

[ElectricBlue7331]

Works quite well. It properly detects animals and objects that are both close and far in the frame that should be blurred. Most of the time the blur looks correct with minimal artifacts. 

I have two pieces of feedback. The default blur amount of 50 seems to be very strong. I find myself turning it down to around 20-30 every time while broadening the focal range to further mitigate the extreme effect. Second, performance using other modules specifically masking seems to be heavily impacted when Lens Blur is enabled. I understand that early access often has these issues so I will wait until final release and see how it feels.

For completeness, I included my lightroom system info file in case it's helpful

Looking forward to full release

[dkirk335]

loving lens blur! No more sliding texture and claity to 0 only to get mediocre results.  Would love to see you be able to zoom in and out with the space bar while appling blur.

[Stephanie26617493pjsh]

Please add the ability to add and subtract where the lens blur is applied (like a mask) as the AI doesn't usually get everything correct and it looks off.

[simonsaith]

There is one. Try to expand the "Refine" collapsible arrow widget to access to the additional brush refine options. Julieanne has a very good tutorial video on this.

[The Camino]

Actually I like it, but in all tools, applying 100% looks like an utter cheese ball moment!  Looks like a F .85 lens.  It might be more 'natural' if you have the blur slider work with the feather on a ratio together.   Maybe it would 'cheat the look' better when I decide to get out the pipe wrench and really, really crank that slider.

(Sometimes it looks like a green screen shot, or I'm playing a point and click adventure game from the 90's!  Hilarious.)

Other than that, it's a good idea.  

I'm pretty glad I get updates to my software on a regular basis, and honestly, this one?  Pretty cool.

[AguiA5C45]

Não estou conseguindo realizar o novo "Desfoque de Lente" em meu Lightroom Classic. No meu notebook está acusando uma janela de erro logo quando clico para aplicar o processo. Segue em anexo a mensagem sobre uma parte da foto que estou trabalhando. 

[TrThelen]

Just trying this feature out, but already I really like it!  LOVE the blur effect it gives my photos.

[WS007]

I wonder from where the "lens blurr" tool takes the information which regions of the photo are in the focus area and which not:

Is it an algorithm that checks the actual raw file and decides what is in focus and what not (e.g. checking local contrast)?

Is it information stored in the raw file itself (e.g. information from the focus pixels)?

[simonsaith]

The area of focus is determined by the computed select subject mask.

[WS007]

Thanks - you say it is just the "select subject" mask and the rest is out of focus?

=> This explains, why it sometimes looks artificial, just like a photomontage...

Wolfgang

[simonsaith]

Not exactly. There is AI under-the-hood to compute the depth info of the scene and the lens blur is based on that. Then there is the select subject mask to tell Lr where it should focus on by default, like the camera's auto focus. Of course which part of the photo should be in focus can be adjusted by the user via the various focus controls in the Lightroom UI.

[WS007]

So the AI computes the depth info similar to contrast based AF?

Is there any information from the focus pixels used?

[Flavio31624230umao]

Gostei muito dessa ferramenta, porém consome muito a Vram da placa de vídeo, mesmo os 12GB são completamente consumidos pela ferramenta e o consumo fica alto tempo depois de já aplicada e encerrado o uso a ferramenta. Acontecia isso também na ferramenta de redução de ruido por IA porém depois de algumas atualizações foi normalizado e espero que asim seja com essa nova ferramenta de desfoque por IA. 

[photoyogi]

first attempt... aprears clunky.

[agrnbrg]

IT GIVES A CLEAR WHITE LINE OF DEMARCATION AROUND THE SUBJECT. 

[simonsaith]

Try fine tune the focus range and reduce the blur amount?

[premiumleo]

I absolutely love this! I've been actively applying this to ALL portrait shots. The only issue is it doesn't copy-paste yet. Please implement this asap. Thank you.

[RKentB]

I like it. The mechanism for adjusting the depth of the blur is super helpful.  I am not sure what the colors mean on that tool, but overall great effort.  I agree with the comments about more and varied bokeh.

[simonsaith]

See https://helpx.adobe.com/lightroom-cc/using/lens-blur.html: When you select Visualize Depth, the overlays on the image show the following colors:

• Warm or Yellow: Covers the area that has a near focal range.
• Cool or Blue: Covers the area that has a far focal range.
• White: Covers the area that is currently in focus if you're adjusting the Focal Range controls.

[Bird Song Images]

This new feature is fabulous. It makes great backgrounds. My only major issue at this point is with blonde hair. When I apply the blur, the frizzy and small ourter hairs turn black 

[Niteesh Reddy]

An absolutely mind blowing feature. Works fantastic.

[Jim5C06]

Pretty cool concept, but after applying Lens Blur, LrC would crash when I went to edit masks. I added 5 masks, added Lens Blur, went back to edit masks, crash, crash, crash. Un-Applying Lens Blur fixed the problem.

Interested in seeing this fixed, but for now I'll stick with selective reduction of Texture and Clarity.

[daleducatte]

I've had a similar experience. The combination of Lens Blur with other masks didn't actually crash Lightroom in my case, but using the sliders (or keying in number values) for any of the mask settings took about five seconds each to respond, with lots of beachballing. Most other settings -- outside the mask panels -- worked fine.

Turning Lens Blur off didn't solve the problem for me.

The image had two masks: one with 34 objects selected, and an inverted copy of that mask. 

Thinking that the number of mask objects might be causing a performance problem with LRC 13, I created a physical copy of the RAW file I was working with, renamed it, and imported it into Lightroom. Then I copied all the settings (including the masks) from the problem file to the new copy (pasting settings, I understand, doesn't currently copy Blur), and performance of mask settings was normal on the new version of the image.