Adobe Lightroom Finally Gets Automatic AI Noise Reduction

For several years, smaller shops like DxO and Topaz have offered impressive one-click noise reduction for digital photos, while Adobe’s market-leading Lightroom required users to tinker with sliders, usually resulting in an inferior level of noise reduction.

But amid the AI craze, Adobe is finally adding automatic noise removal—along with several other new features—to Lightroom, Lightroom Classic, and Adobe Camera Raw, a utility included with Photoshop. Here are a few examples of the photo noise removal tool at work:

In addition to the noise removal tool, Adobe announced more Adaptive Presets, Curves in Masking, more people auto-selection categories such as clothes and beards, Black & White for video, and a tech preview of Content Credentials, which allows users to add verifiable attribution to images that survives edits.

Beard and clothes selection in Lightroom

Left: Beard selection. Right: Clothes selection.

Curves in Masking allows you to adjust tone levels for selected regions of a photo. This is great for when you need to, for example, bring up the light on just one object in an image.

Curves in selections in Lightroom

The new Adaptive Presets for portraits can detect the photo’s subject and apply effects only to specific areas. New presets include Polished Portrait, Darken Beard, and Enhance Clothing. The Polished Portrait preset automatically smoothes skin and refines facial features.

More Lightroom on the Web

Adobe also announced that some features already available in installed apps are coming to the web version of Lightroom. These include Select Subject, Sky, and Background. Masking and adaptive presets, including Whiten Teeth and Glamour, are also coming to the web.

More minor feature adds include “Add borders and share” in the mobile version of Lightroom, 18 premium Travel presets, easier edit cut and paste in batch mode, the ability to turn off tooltips, and speedups for cropping, scrolling, panning, and zooming.

For details on all the new features in Lightroom, see Adobe’s Lightroom updates page. And check out our reviews of Lightroom (the cloud-connected enthusiast version) and Lightroom Classic (the version uses by most pro photographers) for our evaluation of the new features.

About Our Expert

Michael Muchmore

Contributor

My Experience

I've been testing PC and mobile software for more than 20 years, focusing on photo and video editing, operating systems, and web browsers. Prior to my current role, I covered software and apps for ExtremeTech and headed up PCMag’s enterprise software team. I’ve attended trade shows for Microsoft, Google, and Apple and written about all of them and their products.

I still get a kick out of seeing what's new in video and photo editing software, and how operating systems change over time. I was privileged to byline the cover story of the last print issue of PC Magazine, the Windows 7 review, and I’ve witnessed every Microsoft misstep and win, up to the latest Windows 11.

I’m an avid bird photographer and traveler—I’ve been to 40 countries, many with great birds! Because I’m also a classical music fan and former performer, I’ve reviewed streaming services that emphasize classical music.

Technology I Use

For everyday work, I use a good-old Dell tower with 16GB of RAM, a 12th-gen Intel Core i7 processor, and an Nvidia RTX 3060 Ti GPU that runs on Windows 11. I pair it with a 4K Lenovo ThinkVision P27u-10 monitor and a Logitech MX Vertical mouse. For offsite work, I use a 2024 Microsoft Surface Laptop with a Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite processor. Camera-wise, I moved to mirrorless from a Canon EOS 80D with a Canon 70-300mm IS USM lens. I now have a Canon EOS R7 with a 100-400mm lens, but I miss my DSLR for several reasons.

In order of usage, the software I turn to most frequently is the Edge web browser, Slack, Adobe Creative Cloud, Microsoft 365, Firefox, Brave, and WhatsApp. I use the Windows Phone link app to see everything on my Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra phone, which has excellent telephoto capability.

For fitness monitoring, I have a Fitbit Charge 6 and use an Anker Smart Scale P1. I’m also a streaming fan, so I subscribe to both Amazon Music Unlimited (especially for its Dolby Atmos content) and Qobuz (for its high-res sound quality and classical catalog). I recently added a Vizio 5.1 Soundbar SE, which sounds surprisingly good given its low price. To holler commands instead of using a remote control, I have the Amazon Fire TV Cube in the living room, which lets me verbally tell the TV what I want to watch. It hooks up to an LG B4 OLED TV. I have a Sonos One speaker in my kitchen that also ties in with Alexa, as does the Echo Dot 2 With Clock in my bedroom. For serious listening, I have B&W 601 speakers plugged into a Conrad-Johnson Sonographe amp and preamp, with a Cambridge Audio AXN10 streamer as source. For reading, I also have a Nook GlowLight 3.

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