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: 

[Simon S Chen]

Some suggestions:

1. Does it help if you turn off one of the dual displays.
2. When brushing, try to keep the loupe preview smaller (say Fit vs 1:1 zoom)

3. Follow https://helpx.adobe.com/lightroom-classic/kb/troubleshoot-gpu.html to update your machine to the latest GPU driver and  see if the problem resolves itself. 

[John R Ellis]

@Angel Scan, "DirectX: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 6GB (31.0.15.3699)"

That driver is several months old. Install the latest Studio Driver (537.58):

https://www.nvidia.com/download/driverResults.aspx/212703/en-us/

[msolerm]

Cada vez que intento usar la función de desenfoque, aparece una ventana emergente que señala que Algo salió mal. No la he podido usar

[simonsaith]

Please share your system info via Lightroom>Help>System Info... Try to update to the latest macOS version or if you are on a Windows machine, follow https://helpx.adobe.com/lightroom-classic/kb/troubleshoot-gpu.html to update your machine to the latest GPU driver and  see if the problem resolves itself.

If the OS or the driver is not available or possible and the problem persists, then try the following workaround method as a last resort. The method provides a mechanism to allow LrDesktop/LrClassic/ACR customers to force the ML inference to always run on CPU instead of default. See details here https://helpx.adobe.com/camera-raw/kb/acr-gpu-faq.html#lens-blur

[Sharron32]

How do I uninstall the latest update with the lens blur? I want to revert back to my version before the update.

[Brittany32991215nczp]

50 seems a bit to strong for me right off the bat, id love to have the abitliy to set my own value to work off of when first applying. 

[Renato329924994ubw]

Olhando rapido aqui sem muitos teste gostei , senti falta de uma borracha para apgar as falhas da leitura IA que as vezes deixa borrado oque não era para estar , senti falta de um controle baseado em 3d e não 2d como este parece ser , usei em imagens  JPG e em RAW e os resultados foram incrivelmente bons .

Em alguns casos a seleção da IA  não é perfeita, fica borrada sem nitidez por exemplo nos braços e ao redor da cabeça, então os fios de cabelo ficam desfocados , por vezes o vão de pernas , braços , ou mesmo entre uma pessoa e outro ficam desfocados ....

[Brittany32991215nczp]

Em alguns casos a seleção da IA não é perfeita, fica borrada sem nitidez
por exemplo nos braços e ao redor da cabeça, então os fios de cabelo ficam
desfocados , por vezes o vão de pernas , braços , ou mesmo entre uma pessoa
e outro ficam desfocados ....

[GMMagee]

I am having a lot of difficulty with the Lens Blur Tool. It is taking extremely long to function. What are the minimum requirements for its use? I have 32 GB RAM, 1 TB SSD with a GeForce 3050 GPU, and a Corei7-10700 CPU

[pskelhorne]

My observations and feedback:

I'm running Lightroom Classic 13.0.1 on a late 2019 MacBook Pro with 32GB of RAM on macOS Sonoma 14.0. GPU is AMD Radeon Pro 5500M.

When the lens blur works, it's great. With some fine-tuning it can produce a very realistic effect. Unfortunately, soon after I started using it, it started turning the whole screen black when I'd move a slider or press Visual Depth. The same thing happened when I'd use the Dehaze slider -- black screen. When I'd use Dehaze in a mask the masked area would be solid black unless I set Dehaze to 0.

Based on comments in other threads about this problem, which started with Dehaze and seems to extend now to Lens Blur, I turned off my GPU for everything except Display. This seems to help, but now LR runs very slowly. When I move from the Library to the Develop module, for instance, the image I'm trying to work on doesn't display for several long seconds -- all I see is a grey screen. When I press the "eyeball" beside a mask, it takes a few seconds before the mask is disabled. Hard to toggle back and forth to see the effect of the mask.

So...my feedback is that it seems there's something amiss with the way Lens Blur and Dehaze are hitting the GPU. Besides disabling the GPU, I have seen no other workarounds and definitely no fixes. I certainly hope no one will suggest the solution is to buy a new computer...

[simonsaith]

You can try out this tip https://community.adobe.com/t5/lightroom-classic-discussions/p-new-ai-powered-lens-blur-early-access...

[JohnWGaudette]

On first try I fell in love with this feature, I used it on a sports shoot it worked seemlessly.

My only suggestion, if one has a bunch of like images, allow the blur to be synced accross multiple images.

[Bob Ulius]

If I have not posted an update, BLUR works great for me bit maybe one out of 6 or 8 tries. I can get this:

When not, my ENTIRE computer freezes and nothing works. Not even mouse. HARD reboot.

When I do get the message, LrC disables and greys out the GPU settings.

Can never tell when it will work. Sometimes purging the cache (which has near nothing in it) AND changing cache size gets it to work next try after closing and opening LrC.

system info...

[simonsaith]

Thanks for sharing your system info. Your CPU and GPU might be a little bit under-powered I think. But you have lots of RAM 32GB.  Try the following workaround to force the ML inference to always run on CPU. See details here https://helpx.adobe.com/camera-raw/kb/acr-gpu-faq.html#lens-blur. It would unload some of the workload from the GPU.

[Bob Ulius]

Funny you should mention. I cannot get this to work.

First, the file is not downloadable. No way. When it opens, has one line- Disable GPU Inference

When placed in the directory, open LrC, GPU shows still enabled. Can you help me better try that?

~Bob

[simonsaith]

Sorry for the confusion. You can do a right mouse click on the link and download. You can also create a dummy file with the expected file name in the specified folder. That would work too. The content of the file does not matter.

>When placed in the directory, open LrC, GPU shows still enabled. Can you help me better try that?
This is expected. The intention of this workaround is NOT to disable GPU for your normal use LrClassic. It just tells LrClassic to delegate the ML inference part of the workarlod to CPU and it would not take any additional resource from your GPU, which seems to be a more precious resource in your setup.

[Bob Ulius]

Actually, no. No download in context menu in Firefox.

And, as I said, I did place a text file  with that name in the proper place and GPU shows as still active. What am I missing?

[Bob Ulius]

No right click download in Edge, either.

[Bob Ulius]

Ahhh, just read this:

This is expected. The intention of this workaround is NOT to disable GPU for your normal use LrClassic. It just tells LrClassic to delegate the ML inference part of the workarlod to CPU and it would not take any additional resource from your GPU, which seems to be a more precious resource in your setup.

So no indication it is working. Ok, will test to see just what it improves. Thanks!

[simonsaith]

Relaunch LrClassic. How does the lens blur work now after you put in the named file in the right folder? Ignore the active GPU settings. It is expected.

[Bob Ulius]

Two images in a row and NO issues! Thank you!

Can you tell me what this is doing? Does Photoshop need similar? Will future versions of Blur still need this?

[simonsaith]

Good to hear. If you use the ACR plug-in in Photoshop, you need to follow the similar procedure described in the help doc for the ACR plug-in. Otherwise, you're good for your current machine setup. If you upgrade to a more beefy machine with a stronger GPU, you might not need to do this in your new machine setup.

[Bob Ulius]

Just an FYI - updated the NVIDIA drivers to the absolutely most current today and without the GPU solution I crash hard again. So it is not the driver. As soon as I put the file back, all good again.

[Greg22914082uxsp]

So far I'm impressed. I like that I can create a shallow depth of field for an image that didn't have enough to begin with. Way easier than it used to be. At least to me it is.

[Brianna276083140rru]

I love this tool. It is fascinating how well it works and really gives images that extra pop. Currently, every time I work on one photo, my Lightroom freezes and tells me that an error occurred and it needs to close, asking what the error is and if I want to report it or not. 
In the future, it would be nice if this does have the option to copy and paste to photos.