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: 

[hopeful_experts5CBF]

need to add mask

[Aorta314306591yq4]

I just posted the same.

[Bob Trlin]

It's brilliant!  Super fast lenses are way to expensive anyway 🙂
However, in one image of a bird on a branch whith a nearby twig, all in focus but a little soft, when applying Lens Blur, a small section of the twig was blured.  Easily fixed with Focus/Blur but it was hard not to leave artifacts.  Anyway, the curious thing was that this happened only when Lens Blur is applied either before or after Denoising the image.  It did not happen when adding Lens Blur to the standard image. 

[christineg12327708]

Cant follow very detailed objekts in nature photography.

[authentic_creation16B8]

OK . this is pretty good right out of the box

[j.gumilar]

ich finde diese Funktion sehr nützlich!

[Robyn Fine Art Photos]

I LOVE this new feature in Lightroom - So Useful!! - please add to Photoshop too!!!

[robertb11838567]

I just did a quick test on an image and love the results. I love the inclusion of the depth map preview as it was super useful to spot refine some edges.

[andrew21617250fr2d]

tried it a few times now.  1st time it 100% missed the subject and blurred too much.

2nd time was more sucessful but it gave the image a very hard edge on a horizontal that didnt look remotely natural

[Shutterbug2]

Im sorry to say I am unable to try this as it is unresponsive on my laptop.

[John R Ellis]

@Shutterbug2, "Im sorry to say I am unable to try this as it is unresponsive on my laptop."

It may be an issue with your graphics processor or its driver. Please do the LR menu command Help > System Info and copy/paste the entire contents here so we can see exactly which versions of hardware and software LR thinks you're running and important LR options that are set.

[Don3rdSE]

wide line around the sculpture against a dark sky. Yikes! First try. Not good. I have tried adjusting. Some improvement but not helpful on this photo.

[Aorta314306591yq4]

first quick-look: so far so good. Very useful!

[Mostafa29666191cx3u]

Great feature! Should add a select subject/ brush option so you can pick what can be deselected 

[DaVincifoto]

amazing!

[ChelseaBeckPhoto]

The lens blur feature looks AMAZING. Two draw back for me is 1. it's not syncing to other images unless I am doing something wrong. 2. It bogs my comptuter down like CRAZY.  None of the other AI feature are doing this but as soon as I check the lens blur box my computer freaks out and has even restarted a few times. Not sure what's happening with that.

[garyd03]

Same with mine. Have an i9 machine. Plenty of RAM. If you look at task manager you will see 100% RAM and processor use when you activate Lens Blur.

My NVIDIA graphics card has the latest update. Purged the cache.

As soon as I uncheck it LR back to normal.

Just not usable as part of my workflow.

Sent from my iPhone

[ChelseaBeckPhoto]

Exactly! I did the same thing. I think it looks good though but it takes
about 2-3 minutes for just one image before my computer calms down!

--

[John R Ellis]

@garyd03 and @ChelseaBeckPhoto, please do the LR menu command Help > System Info and copy/paste the entire contents here so Adobe can see exactly which versions of hardware and software LR thinks you're running.

[Rosario30947426l9dc]

Incredible!!! 

[Fredseye]

just needs improvement on masking the subjects to keep in focus and blurs the rest

[Clayok]

You need a specific "reset" button hear and and easier way to adjust or touch areas of primary or least focus. Thank you.

[John R Ellis]

[This post contains formatting and embedded images that don't appear in email. View the post in your Web browser.]

@Clayok,"You need a specific "reset" button here..."

The Lens Blur panel is like the other panels -- hold down Alt / Opt and you'll see the Reset button for that panel:

[Aorta314306591yq4]

It would be VERY cool to add the option to create a mask from the depth info. Then it'd be perfect 🙂

[haroldcundal]

Honestly pretty amazing for a first go! I really like the Refine brush - works great. Hair is understandably tricky yet, but I'm super excited to see how this evolves!