New AI tools arrive in Lightroom and Photoshop

Adobe has announced a range of new AI features at its annual Adobe MAX conference in Los Angeles, with several updates aimed at photographers working in Lightroom and Photoshop.

The tools are intended to improve workflow speed and offer more control during editing, and there's a few welcome features. 

Lightroom: assisted image culling

The main update for Lightroom is Assisted Culling (now in public beta).

The feature helps photographers review large shoots by filtering images based on sharpness, focus and shooting angle, making it easier to select preferred frames among large numbers of images.

The next handy new feature is an automatic dust-removal tool for Lightroom and Adobe Camera Raw, which is now out of beta.

This tool helps clean up sensor spots in photos and is part of the Remove Distractions toolset.

In addition, Adobe says the suite also includes faster Generative Fill options for removing people or objects, now twice as quick, and the reflection-removal tool introduced last year in Adobe Camera Raw has been improved further. 

Photoshop: new compositing and upscaling features

Photoshop also receives several additions:

• Generative Fill updates
  
  Partner AI models, including Google Gemini 2.5 Flash Image, FLUX.1 Kontext and Firefly, now support more accurate edits when adding, removing or adjusting elements in a scene.

• Generative Upscale
  
  A new option powered by Topaz Labs AI can upscale low-resolution or cropped images to 4K. The feature is useful for improving small files or images created with lower-resolution models.

• Harmonize
  
  This tool blends inserted subjects or objects into a scene by adjusting colour, lighting and tone for a more consistent result.

Another feature Adobe showed off earlier this year is the "Photoshop AI Assistant." It’s basically an AI chatbot you can chat with to handle tasks like renaming layers or adjusting saturation, or it can answer questions about particular tools.

Adobe reckons it can save a few clicks and time you might otherwise spend hunting for a tool or following a tutorial. It should be available soon.
 
Adobe says the updates are part of more than 100 new tools and performance improvements across Creative Cloud.

Further reporting will follow from Tim Levy, attending MAX in Los Angeles for AP & Capture magazine.