Image: Adobe Disclosure: DPReview is attending Adobe Max, with Adobe covering travel and lodging expenses. Adobe is holding its Max conference this week, which means we're getting a slate of updates to Photoshop and Lightroom that make some of the features it's been announcing over the year available to the general public.
Perhaps the most exciting one, especially for photographers, is Lightroom's Assisted Culling feature. Adobe said it was working on it earlier this year, but it's finally arriving in public beta. The idea is that it will let you quickly filter through a large batch of images to find the good ones, selecting by angle and how in-focus and sharp they are. The company says the feature will be launching in public beta soon.
The updates coming today include a bunch of small tweaks and features, too.
Photo: Mitchell Clark
The company has also brought its automatic dust removal feature in Lightroom and Adobe Camera Raw out of beta, which can help deal with spots on your sensor that show up in photos. It's part of the Remove Distractions suite of tools, which also lets you use Generative Fill tools to remove people and other objects from your photos, which the company says is now two times faster. The company also says it's improved the reflection removal tool, which it introduced into Adobe Camera Raw last year.
Adobe is integrating a chat assistant into several of its apps, including Photoshop.
Image: Adobe
Another feature previewed earlier this year is what Adobe is calling the "Photoshop AI Assistant. " Essentially, it's an AI chatbot that you can ask to do various tasks in the app, such as renaming layers and adjusting saturation, potentially saving you some clicks or time that otherwise would've been spent looking up a tutorial or searching for a specific tool. The company is now starting to roll it out, making the feature available in Photoshop for the web as a private beta, via a waitlist that Adobe says it will let people into starting this week.
Of course, several of the features Adobe has announced make use of generative AI. Photoshop's Generative Upscale feature, which was added to the Photoshop beta earlier this year, is launching in the mainline version of the app. By default, it will be powered by Adobe's Firefly model, but now the company says you'll have the option of using Topaz Labs' Gigapixel and Bloom models as well, which could work better on certain types of images. They can, however, cost quite a few AI credits – up to 20 of them – and, the ones included in the cheaper Photography Creative Cloud plans don't work with any of the features that utilize partner models.
In that vein, the company is also updating Photoshop's Generative Fill to support models other than its own Firefly model. Like Generative Upscale, this feature was announced earlier this year in beta, but is now available to the general public. Additionally, the "Harmonize" feature, which was shown off as a preview at last year's Max and made available in beta this summer, is now widely available. The tool attempts to composite different layers together by matching color and lighting.
One AI Feature that doesn't necessarily involve the cloud is subject selection, which the company says is improved in the latest release. In April it introduced the option to process the selection in the cloud, which provided better performance. Now, that model they were using can be run locally, instead, making it easier to select subjects even if you don't have an active internet connection. Adobe's Stephen Nielson, Sr. Director of Product Management of Photoshop, told us that the company was interested in using local models rather than cloud-based ones whenever it was feasible.
Despite Adobe's best efforts, not everything new revolves around AI
Despite Adobe's best efforts, not everything new revolves around AI. The new, more powerful version of Photoshop Mobile, which launched earlier this year for iPhones and iPads, is also now generally available for Android phones, greatly expanding the number of people who can access it. It has a free tier that you can use without a Creative Cloud subscription, but some features will require one. Access is included in the Photoshop Mobile and Web plan, which costs $7. 99/month or $69. 99 annually.
Image: Adobe
Speaking of Photoshop Web, the company is bringing the stylization effects feature out of beta. These make it easy to add different looks to your image (or specific parts of it), and include options like "glitch," which separates the red, green, and blue channels to make your image look like a poor VHS transfer, "comic" to give it an illustrated look, and motion blur, which adds directional blur to make it seem like something's moving. Each effect has a set of parameters you can tweak. Of course, they're all things you could have achieved in Photoshop before, but having them as one-click options makes the process substantially easier.
Adobe has also updated Camera Raw, giving you the option to automatically mask out snowy parts of landscapes, letting you easily isolate it for editing. There's also now a slider called "Variance" in the color mixer panel, which Adobe says will let you "fine-tune the color and tone of an image to achieve tonal consistency," especially when it comes to skin tones and fine variations in color.
We'll be on the ground at Adobe Max this year, so stay tuned for demos of some of these new features and previews of what we might see over the next year.
. dpreview.com2025-10-29 15:00