Photo Enhancements Made Easy with Lightroom for Mobile & Web

[Music] [Brian Matiash] Welcome, everyone.

This session, if it's not painfully obvious is called Photo Enhancements Made Easy with Lightroom for Mobile & Web. This is a fun one because it's going to give me the opportunity to show you some improvements and new features that we introduced into Lightroom two days ago on the first day of Adobe MAX. And I also want to give a shout out to Adobe Express, the Express team. I love Express. I don't know if you guys have tried it, but I built the slide deck using Express and I just love that it's all in the cloud. And everything I'm going to show you with Lightroom is cloud based, hence the kind of on the nose theme of blue sky with clouds. So, I figure it's always helpful to start by telling you guys who I am, why this guy is sitting on this stage, while you're sitting here and listening.

My name is Brian, so hello. And I actually do love more than these three things. But in the context of this session, I think it's appropriate to at least start with these, so. And I think it'll give you an idea of my approach to photography, my approach to editing, my approach to teaching. So, I grew up in Brooklyn and have great parents, took care of me and everything. And then when I was 17, I went to school. I went to Syracuse University. And that was the first time I was away from home, and it didn't respond well to me. I had a major anxiety. It was really hard for me to leave my dorm room, and I wouldn't go to classes. Sometimes friends would bring food for me because I was just terrified to go out. And something I was trying to think about the specifics. I asked my mom. All I remember is she said she ordered me a camera. She ordered me a Canon AE-1 35 millimeter film camera. She said either someone told her or she read that that photography has been linked with helping with getting over that anxiety. I'm not afraid of people. I'm not afraid of any of that stuff in hindsight. It just was that first time, it was such a shock to the system that I just wanted to be in my dorm room.

Photography was like a switch.

As soon as I got the camera and I mean, I didn't know what I was doing. I never ever expressed any artistic tendencies growing up. I played video games. And so it became something that was-- I won't be so dramatic like it saved my life, but it did. It got me comfortable with going out. And because you're with photography, you can choose to be whether you want to be an active participant or a passive one, I was passive. I liked to see what was going on so I would be off on the side and have this thing covering my face.

And so photography is way more than just a hobby. It's way more than my profession.

It defines me.

I also absolutely love editing photos. I would actually probably say that I love editing photos more than I love taking photos.

With that said, I do believe very strongly that there are three ways that a photographer could put their stamp, you guys, on your photos. The first is the composition. You can have 10 people standing in front of the exact same subject, Delicate Arch, and you can walk away with 10 different photos.

The editing, so you can have those 10 people who took even the same exact photo of Delicate Arch, but you can edit it different ways. And then how you share it, what kind of story you put, where you share it, the platform.

And so all three of those things, I believe, form the life cycle of a photo. I never understood-- To me, the natural order of a photo is for it to be taken, edited, and shared, especially if it's a photo you like. If it's a photo you like and you don't share it, it just feels there's something wrong to me about that.

And as far as editing goes, Lightroom is my favorite by far. If there was a better app to edit my photos in, I wouldn't be here. I certainly wouldn't be working at Adobe.

Lightroom is the best, period. So, that's why I love Lightroom because it helps me achieve my creative vision. And finally, I am truly blessed with the opportunity to help people do both and improve your photography, improve your editing, and just get more comfortable with it. So during the day, I'm a Software Quality Engineer on the Lightroom Desktop team. We won't be covering Lightroom Desktop here, but it is a component of the cloud-based ecosystem of Lightroom, and it's different than Lightroom Classic just to make that clear. So the fact that I also get to help as an SQE, basically, I help test the new features or bugs that are reported to see whether they're fixed so that when you guys get it, you don't have any of those sharp edges. And then I just love helping people. That's my thing.

On top of that, I have a YouTube channel which is filled with tons of Lightroom content. And I do share my photos on Instagram as well. So what are we going to cover? First, we're going to cover Lightroom Mobile. So just raise your hand. Have you heard of or used Lightroom Mobile? Awesome. So for the few of you who don't or if you're just not exactly sure, I mean Lightroom Mobile is of the trifecta of Lightroom's cloud ecosystem, Lightroom Mobile is one of them.

Oh, actually, another question. How many of you use your phone either as your primary or your sole camera? Oh, right. That's awesome. Okay. Then Lightroom Mobile should probably be very familiar to you. But it's one of those things where if you are already using your mobile device to take your photos, you can just import it right into Lightroom, apply edits, I mean, amazing edits with really powerful tools, and then share them anywhere with anyone, all within one app. It's really fantastic, and it keeps getting better. And then we're also going to cover another one of the trifecta of the cloud-based ecosystem with Lightroom Web. So how many people know that there is a really powerful version of Lightroom that you can access right in a web browser tab? Yeah. Okay. I'm going to show that to you as well. This blew me away the more I started to use it. If we think about a web browser tab like you open up Chrome or Safari, it's mostly a consumption device, right? We open it up to go to a website to browse something or to search for something, and we consume it.

So when I realized that we can use Lightroom in a browser tab to actually create something, it's really amazing. And the best part is that you can start your edits. You take your photo with your phone. You do some edits. Maybe you then want to continue on with it on a larger display. All of those edits, including the photo, will be available in web, which is phenomenal.

Now specifically, I'm going to demo, not demo, edit five photos. And all five photos have a common denominator. They're all going to leverage Generative Remove, which is powered by Adobe Firefly. It's basically a magic eraser, so to speak. It's like the magic eraser product by-- Well, I can't remember the brand.

Anyway, point is, if there's a complicated object or distraction you want to get rid of-- I've had photos where years ago, I tried to edit them but I couldn't because the tools that we had available...

They ended up ruining the photo and trying to remove the distraction. And they would smudge everything and it just didn't look good. And so Generative Remove is really powerful. It's allowed me to salvage a lot of photos that I otherwise would never have shared. And we've improved it. There's better selection capabilities. I'll show you that. And then the new feature, the tent pole feature with Lightroom is called Quick Actions. So I call Quick Actions Lightroom 101. So if you're newer to Lightroom and you maybe were navigating through some of the different panels and maybe you're like, "I don't know what this is." Quick Actions is for you because it's a new panel. And what it does is when you open a photo in Lightroom, Quick Actions will look at the contents of the photo and then it will surface recommended edits based on what's in the photo. It's really, really powerful. And the best part is that you will get the results, those really high-end results that normally you'd have to use the advanced tools for. It automates it for you.

So from a new user perspective, that's a benefit. From someone who's very familiar with Lightroom, I use Quick Actions all the time because it does the things I want to do just faster. I know how to do it. I'm comfortable with it, but I'm all about efficiency as well. I'm not at that point in my life anymore where I can just invest three hours into editing a single photo. So if I can speed things up, I'm all for it. And currently, Quick Actions is available as an early access. So you'll see this little blue badge. You could see it.

Well, in web, you'll see it says early access on top left there. That just means that we're still actively developing it. So things might change that or that it might look a little bit different until it gets fully released. But still, it works really well.

So why should you use Lightroom Mobile? I mean, most of you already know that. Renee, hello, and Dennis.

Dennis is my colleague from Wacom. I used to work there.

So again, I'm all about not compromising wherever I can. And so the fact that I can...

Import my photos, edit my photos, share my photos, and it's not like this watered-down app is really impressive. And the fact that everything I do on my iPhone immediately syncs to all other surfaces of Lightroom Desktop and Web, it's a compelling feature. And then, of course, I can just export things. I can export them in different aspect ratios if I want and share them on my platform of choice or I can just share them directly with my family and friends.

So now let's actually have the rubber meet the road.

I've got here this is my iPhone 16 Pro Max. I'm using Apple's nifty new iPhone screen mirroring. So does this-- Can everyone see this okay? Okay, cool. So in all of my images, I like to have a workflow. I like to have an order of operation, so to speak. And the first thing I generally like to do is remove distractions. This is my buddy, Chris. I took this photo many years ago. And I don't think I positioned him ironically there with that residential services director sign, but it's there. Now Generative Remove, like I mentioned, is a very powerful AI-powered tool. But it's very important that you do this first, for two reasons. The first is, it's good to get rid of your distractions. But second is, let me illustrate this to you. So I want to get rid of that sign. Let's say you decide first I'm going to crop. So I'm going to crop here like that.

Let's say I told you, go ahead and use Generative Remove right now without knowing that I cropped it. So if I go to Generative Remove here, in order for Generative Remove to work, this switch needs to be activated. If it's deactivated, then you're going to be using what's called a Content-Aware Remove brush, which is perfect for little things, dust spots, or just little things in the street. Anything that's more significant like this sign, enable this. So let's say I go ahead and I just draw that.

So Lightroom is going to...

Analyze it and actually did a good job. And the reason why is I had this. Let me undo this. I know why. Because I had object detection. So I'm going to do this one more time...

Like this.

And the reason why you want to do Generative Remove before you crop, see how that sign is still there, is because Lightroom knows that there's other data. It sees the original composition even though you cropped in. And so if we-- Let's commit this. Let's go to crop. Let's reset the crop.

Lightroom saw that area up here.

And so it's like, "Okay, you want to actually change the bottom half of the sign." So watch what happens here. Let's go to-- Actually, I'll just reset this whole photo.

Now when I go to Generative Remove and I'll turn on Detect objects here because I want to illustrate what that does. So if I make a selection, just a rough selection of the sign...

Detect objects will just say, "Oh, okay." You want to-- That's why before when I first demoed it, Detect objects was on, it saw the whole sign and it removed it. Now you can see, though, that sign is gone. There are some things I want to highlight here. The first is the sign's gone. The second is that what it filled it with matched color, tone, and depth. So it's not like the bricks that were replaced are sharper or something. Notice how it looks seamless.

So that's really the only thing that I would do here. Now what I can do if I want is I can crop down.

If you want. You don't-- Totally up to you. But point is, do your Generative Remove first and then crop.

So let's move on to Quick Actions. So pretty much everything in this lesson I'll start with Generative Remove. We'll go to Quick Actions. And then I might dip my toes into the editing stack, the actual editing tools. There are a few that I think, generally benefit most photos. So Quick Actions is this magic wand over here.

When you click on it, this is what Lightroom does. It's like, "All right, I see a photo here. What's in the photo?" Well, I see that there is a subject, so let's give the user some edit tools for a subject. The subject has a background behind.

Let's give some background controls. And the subject, in this case, is a human, a person. So let's give some actual retouching tools.

First thing I generally like to do just for ease is I do like to just use Auto. I don't see any shame in using Auto. It helps a lot. It just corrects color and tone. And if you don't like it, you can always undo. Undo is right over here. I used it just before. But it just helps. It snaps the image.

And in the context of Quick Actions, that's what you want. Now let's start working on the subject. So the first thing I'm going to do is I want to make my subject pop. And then after that, we're going to make the background fall out of emphasis. So I'm going to click on Subject here and this is now what happens. Lightroom actually makes a selection of the subject. You don't have to do anything. And this selection is ridiculously precise. So what I can do is I can use one of these presets. You can see them. There are different ones here. I'm just going to click on Pop. Chris gets brighter. He just looks more pronounced. Then on mobile, you have these additional controls. The amount slider just is like a strength slider. So this is another pro tip. If you don't know what a slider does in pretty much any area of Lightroom, just take the slider and quickly go left to right and then start to slow down...

Until you get to a place where you are happy. So you don't necessarily need to know, all right, what does dehaze do? Well, you don't need to know that. Just drag left and right and see the effect on your image. I want to drop the exposure just a little bit.

And I'm good there. I'm not going to touch saturation on him.

Now let's go ahead and retouch him. So I'm still working on my subject. So let's go ahead. We'll double-click here. And watch what happens when you click, this is so cool, when you click on Retouch. What Lightroom does is it starts identifying the individual components of the person. So it identified the mouth, eyes, skin, hair, and clothing. So let's start with the eyes. So did you see how the eyes popped a little bit? And if I go back and forth, you don't really want that. He doesn't have laser-powered eyes. So we'll bring it back a little bit here.

Then let's go ahead and do some skin smoothing. So, I mean, Chris already has some nice skin, but I do want to smooth it a bit. The nice thing about skin smoothing is it does apply a tasteful amount of skin smoothing while retaining pore texture and that facial hair. And of course, you can dial that in with the slider below.

And then finally, let's bring out some more definition in his shirt. When I click on clothing, again, it just makes the edit to his shirt. Lightroom is intelligent enough to identify that. And so you can see here how it adds a bit more color and contrast.

And so now we've taken care of making Chris pop overall as the subject and then we did some isolated edits to him using the Retouch tools. The last thing we want to do is Terry White actually made this interesting point at the Keynote on Monday when he was demoing the Lightroom tools where one of the best ways to make your subject pop is to make the background darker. And so by clicking on background here, Lightroom makes the selection of the background. And what I can do is now just darken that background until he really starts to pop. And I can also desaturate it by taking away the color, you sometimes deemphasize the subject, in this case, the background. And so now when I click and hold, I mean, again, this is what we started with. Remember, we cropped. And then afterwards, I mean, if I wasn't narrating, this is something you also have to remember. If I didn't have to narrate this, this would be done in five seconds. I mean, boom, boom, boom, boom. Done.

So let's move ahead. I've got another image here. And so I found this abandoned car, in the middle of Nebraska somewhere. And it's corn patrol.

And there's not at all creepy stuffed animals staring right at me with their dead eyes. But it's a cool car. And the thing is that there are some things that I would like to get rid of. I couldn't lift this tractor no matter how hard I tried. I also didn't want these a little-- I think these are hay bales. And then do any of you submit to Stock at all? Okay. So for those of you that don't know, if you do submit to Stock, you cannot submit things unless you have the appropriate permissions with anything with brands or trademarks or anything like that. Those have to be removed. So I'm going to go ahead here. Again, like I said, we're not going to crop, but the first thing that we want to do is use Gen Remove. So I'll start by-- Actually, let me get out of here. I'm going to zoom in first. This is a weird little hiccup bite, the way I'm connecting my iPhone is that I have to go in and out of Gen Remove to zoom. But what I'm going to do is I'm going to start-- Let me bring my brush size up.

I'm going to start by making a selection of the tractor.

Lightroom will refine the selection and it's like, "Okay. What does Brian want to remove? He wants to remove the tractor." Now with every general move stroke that you apply, whether it's in Lightroom, whether it's in Photoshop, you get three variations, three options to access them, because maybe you're like, "Oh, I want to see maybe it removed that." I don't think it was a side view mirror. I think it was a light. But when you click on Refine here, you'll see there are three variations and you can arrow through them. Some of them might be better than others. So in fact, that one I like. I don't mind that that light is gone, but I like the way it actually fills.

If you don't like anything, you can regenerate and get another three variations. That's not a problem. So that was that first thing.

Now let's go ahead and let me make sure I'm on edge there.

Let's remove this. This will be a lot easier. Just not that that tractor was very difficult. I think Gen Remove did a really good job there. But here, we'll remove what I think we're going to go with is hay bales. Perfect there. And then let's remove the branding. Let's say I want to submit this to a Stock agency. I can guarantee you, guarantee you, it will take them no time at all to be rejected brand. So I'll go back here and let's remove the Pontiac sign or the logo. Now that is a complex removal because that's a grill. So there's a lot of just lines, vertical and horizontal, different tones. I don't know what Pontiac sign you're talking about, though. I mean, it's just gone. And then let's get rid of the mark. So same thing as before.

This is the thing about Gen Remove that's amazing. Again, it doesn't just try to remove things. It also matches texture and tone and color.

So we're good. We've taken care of our distractions. Now let's go ahead. We'll go back to-- We're in Quick Actions here. And I want to point out one thing. Or maybe do you notice something different? Yeah. Sky. So Lightroom's like, "Okay, cool. I see a subject. I'm pretty sure the subject's the car. I don't see a person, so why am I going to give you retouch? But what I do see is a sky. So how about I give you some sky controls?" So let's start. Let's click on Auto. I think Auto does a great job here. It again, boosts a little bit of the-- It was underexposed. It was also overexposed in the sky. You can see a little bit more definition. But now let's go ahead and let's click on Sky. Now Lightroom is now making a selection of the sky. I can tell you that to make that selection manually, it's not impossible but it wouldn't be worth my time. And so I would just walk away with either this really boring sky or I'd have to do some really poor masking because I'm not very good at it.

I'm going to apply a preset called Blue Drama. Again, part of this demo here is I'm over accentuating a little bit just so you can visualize the changes. So here, I can increase the overall strength of that Blue Drama preset. I can darken it just a bit.

And then before, I mentioned a dehaze slider. A dehaze slider, this is like your best friend if you have a blue sky with clouds. Also, if you have reflections that you want to get rid of, it does a really good job of deemphasizing reflections while also, I mean, bringing out contrast in blue skies. Again, if you're unsure what a slider does, go like this. Do not-- Yeah, I saw the scrunchie face over there. Do not do this. I mean, don't do this either. But a little bit goes a long way, like salt.

And so we've taken care of the sky. Now let's go ahead and take care of the background. I'll start with the background before the subject. So you can see here, I've got these trees here. One of the other ways that you can emphasize your subject is by-- The eye is always pretty much drawn to the brightest, sharpest, most contrasty things. So it stands to reason that that's what you want to be the brightest, sharpest thing, is the car.

What if I want to simulate a shallow plane of focus, a shallow depth of field, by blurring out the background? I can do that. I can click on background here. And again, what Lightroom is doing is it's estimating depth. So it's creating a depth map. It's trying to figure out what is actually closest to you and what is further away in a two-dimensional photo, which is very impressive. And so when I click on subtle here, you'll see it creates this blur effect. Now similar to the dehaze slider, I highly recommend being subtle with blur.

We're really, really smart in general as people. And we can tell, a person can tell, that just doesn't look natural. It's like that uncanny valley effect, when you go overboard, unless you're intentional with it. If you're intentional, do what you want. But if you're trying to pass it off, yes, you have to abide by that common sense.

So we've taken care of simulating a shallow plane of focus. I can also drop the exposure just a bit...

And then we're good with the background. And then finally, I can go ahead and work on the subject. So I clicked on subject, which again, Lightroom is now making-- Every time I click on one of those things other than Auto, it's like Lightroom is making a selection of something for you and then giving you treatment options, which are these presets. So if I click on Pop, see how the car just popped? Just the car. And you can see, again, if I adjust the slider, only the car is being affected. So here, maybe it's a bit too bright, so I'll decrease the exposure a bit...

And I'll increase the saturation.

And then there we go. Here's this. Here's this. Now I mentioned how Quick Actions is great. It's like Lightroom 101. It gets you really great results without having to worry about creating masks. That's what Lightroom is doing for you.

But there are some things like if you go-- This is the edit stack. This is where all of your primary editing tools are. So if you go to effects, for example, there's a tab for Vignette. And so a vignette, depending on which direction you go, will either brighten or darken the edges of the frame proportionally towards the center. And you have some controls over that. But all you really need to do is just bring this down. Again, the eye is drawn towards the brightest, sharpest thing. So let's facilitate that. Let's draw the eye towards the center of the frame.

And so, again, that's what we started with. That's what we were able to accomplish. So I think that's really compelling that we can do this with minimal effort.

So what I'd like to do now is switch gears to Lightroom Web. And I'm actually really excited about this because of how few people raised their hands when I asked if you used or heard of Lightroom Web.

You might be asking yourself why would I want to use Lightroom Web? The first reason and I genuinely believe this, it really is the easiest way for you to get familiar with Lightroom. You don't have to install Lightroom Desktop. There are people who are intimidated by that. They have to install this app and then go through all of these wizards and everything. I don't know what's going on. I'm just going to bomb out. I'm not going to deal with this. Lightroom Web, you just go to lightroom.adobe.com, log in with your Adobe ID. All of the images that you've already synced to the cloud through Lightroom Mobile will be there along with your edits. And so it's a comfortable thing. And you also get the benefit of having a larger user interface. So what I showed you, yeah, it's great because it's projected on a giant screen. But still, even the largest iPhone or Android although the folds are pretty cool. So there are some options there. But for the most part, there are times where you just want to see your image on a larger display and you want more breathing room with your editing tools. That's where Lightroom Web gives you a very, very easy way to do that. And again, you have access to pretty much all of the most important and powerful editing tools, including Quick Actions. And then the last thing I was thinking about this. Because I remember I shared a video, I don't know, seven or eight months ago. I did a full edit from start to finish in Lightroom Web. I posted it. And this one photographer has a big following. He comments. He says, "Yeah, but why?" Not a cool comment. But I thought about that. All right. Well, why? Why would you? Well, in a lot of cases, especially outside of the US and especially in our schools, a lot of people just have Chromebooks. And so you can't install a Lightroom Desktop because that's for Mac and PC.

But the Lightroom Web will run beautifully on a Chromebook. Also, let's say you're traveling abroad and you don't have data, you don't have an internet connection, but you need access to a photo for whatever reason that you know is in your cloud library. Well, I mean, one thing that in most cities around the world are internet cafes or libraries and stuff that have internet. All you need to do is go to public computer, lightroom.adobe.com. You have your stuff there. And to me, that's a very compelling reason for Lightroom Web to exist.

So what I'd like to do is now move on to Lightroom Web. Let me just refresh really quickly just to make sure everything's here.

Did you notice something? I think I did it too quickly. These two photos were the originals before. And then when I refreshed, both of them have the edits that I applied. So in maybe the 60 seconds or so that I was talking with you guys you see, it's a little sneaky. I have a method to my madness for my rambling. But the edits from my phone synced to the cloud, came down here, and everything that I did I can continue to refine.

But we won't do that. We're going to move on. I want to show you additional photos because there are other tips, especially with Generative Remove. So this is basically Lightroom Web's user interface. There is you have your photo browser that you can access. But for the most part, you can see there are the editing tools. Here is Gen Remove. And Lightroom actually did me a favor. So it says here, brush over the entire object including any shadows or reflections. This was my tip for this photo.

In addition to using Generative Remove before you crop, you see how-- I took this years ago in Bondi Beach in Australia. And I saw this surfer starting to leave the ocean. I don't know if he was dejected or anything. He looks bummed out. But I liked the way he was walking out of the water. And, of course, it's a public beach so there are people all around here.

Notice how these people here, they have these reflections that are being cast. People cast shadows, objects cast shadows. If you're going to use Generative Remove, make sure that you don't just select the subject, make sure you also select the shadow that it casts. That will basically, for the most part, guarantee you get a good result. Because if you don't, then Lightroom is going to see the shadow, similar to how we cropped and only saw a half of the sign, it'll see the shadow and it's going to think there's something that should be going with that and it'll try to fill that in. So let's go ahead. Again, similar to mobile, in order to use Gen Remove, you have to have this checkbox enabled. And I'm just going to do like a Thanos snap and just remove all of these people. I promise you they're not actually hurt.

They're doing just fine. And Lightroom is identifying-- I didn't tell Lightroom what to remove. I didn't say remove the people. Lightroom inferred that. And notice how, again, it filled it in seamlessly. The textures match, tone matches, color matches, but there are also variations. I mentioned how all of the surfaces that use any of-- Not just Gen Remove, if you use Photoshop's Generative Fill or Generative Expand, you have variations. But you can see here there are different ones. Some are better than others.

Again, if you didn't like it, you can regenerate by clicking this, but this is totally fine. I can also drop my brush size here and get rid of that guy.

But I also mentioned how...

You don't need to use Gen Remove for everything. If there are dust spots or like-- I'll turn Gen Remove off. If there's this guy right here, it might be hard to see, but when you disable the generative AI checkbox, you're using what's called Content-Aware Remove. Still very powerful, very, very effective for things like dust spots or-- This dark part of the water, it bothers me. Those things just-- I notice it. And one thing you'll notice is when you use the Content-Aware Remove brush with this disabled, it's actually faster because there's no cloud compute that needs to be done as it does with generative AI. So we took care of that. Now let's go to Quick Actions. One thing you'll notice about Quick Actions is that it looks a little bit different on web. There are a few different tools. Notice also how it was analyzing the image. Lightroom's looking. It's like, "What's in this image? It's really cool." It says, "There's a sky." There is a subject-- I would argue that this is a subject, but it is too small in the frame so Lightroom didn't really detect it as a subject. But let's go ahead let's make some edits here. I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to start by tapping on Auto light & color. And again, you can take it or leave it. You can choose to have it. If you don't, you can click on the X here. I personally think it's good. It does what it needs to do here. The next thing I want to do is I want to accentuate the natural characteristics of the golden hour. It's beautiful here. So I'm going to click on golden hour. Again, Lightroom is making this complex selection of the sky. In this case, it's ruined it. This is too strong. But that's fine because, again, there is an amount slider. And like with most things, subtlety can be your friend. So I'm going to bring this to 0 and then just slowly build up.

And it's totally okay if the effect that you apply is subtle. Totally fine. In fact, in most cases, it probably will suit you better.

And the next thing that I want to bring up, notice how we have these Recommended Presets. So if you are a subscriber to Lightroom, if you subscribe to pretty much any of the Creative Cloud plans that give you access to Lightroom, you'll have access to these Recommended Presets which are powered by the Lightroom community, which is amazing. And so if I click View all here, you'll see there are tons of presets that are categorized by subtle, strong.

I personally love subtle and cinematic. I think oftentimes I find some of the best presets there. So if I go to Subtle here, I know this preset looks great. I really like what it does in terms of adding contrast and making everything more of a silhouette. Again, I can control the strength of that preset. There are other things too. If I click on the ellipsis here, I can learn more about who provided that preset, which I think is wonderful. And then also, if I'm like, this preset gets me most of the way but I want to see if there's something else, there's this button here that says more like this. If I click on it, it gives me-- It's just so cool. I love this feature. So that's Recommended Presets. And again, we can continue on. Don't be afraid to start dipping your toes in the editing tools. Nothing here is destructive. This is a non-destructive editing workflow. So you can change things. And don't worry about it. You can adjust it as you need to. And it's not like you're baking it in and you're done you've lost your edits. So experiment a little bit. Again, some of the things I like to do with these types of images is add a little bit of a clarity boost. Definitely not. This. Again, if you're not sure what clarity does, like any slider, go left and right. A negative clarity is actually wonderful if you want to simulate a soft glow. Works really well with portraits. But I generally think anywhere from 2 to 10 on clarity is a happy place, and then we can just add a tiny bit of a vignette.

And so if we see what we started with...

Got rid of all those people, got rid of that dark part in the water that was bothering me, and then added a nice treatment. This treatment, I think, is a great example of accentuating the natural qualities that are already in the image. Again, didn't do much. You don't need to always do much. But I think this works really well.

All right. Let's move on here. Again, this photo, I actually wanted to crop in, and I will. But like I mentioned before, the first thing you really want to do, if you're going to use Gen Remove is to do that first. So let's go ahead here. I'm going to go to the Gen Remove brush. Remember, I turned it off because I showed you how some of the smaller things, for example, this right here, this little spot on the wall...

The Content-Aware Remove brush is totally fine for that. I would not recommend using it for something like this. That's where the Gen Remove tool is so effective. So there are three things in this photo I've identified that I want to remove. The first is this-- You see how most of the wall is fine but there's this section here? Then there's the manhole and then there's the barred window. So I'm just going to make my selection.

Notice how I did not crop first. If I cropped, and in from the right and from the left, Lightroom would have seen like, "Oh, you still have stuff there, and it would try to fill it in with more of it." But look at-- I mean, it-- Oh, right there, boom. Done. Happy with that. Perfect. In fact, it looks better than it was before.

Now let's go ahead, get rid of the manhole.

Again, these are things that you might be okay with it. But for me, the subject was this taxi. I was just walking down this random street in Havana, and I just liked the way it was parked. I don't know. And it's a cute shape to that taxi.

But that manhole is gone, so will...

This barred window be gone. You just let Generative Remove do its thing, and, I mean, we're off to the races. We're good to go here. Let's go ahead. Let's go to Quick Actions. And notice how we have different things. Lightroom did not see a sky, so why would it give us sky like it did before? But it did identify a subject. So as always, let's go ahead. Let's click on Auto light & color. There's also on Lightroom Web's Quick Actions panel, this Straighten perspective. It'll work well here. I mean, you'll see it straightens it. In fact, it's funny. Sometimes with these subtle changes, now this doesn't look right to me. Now it feels like it's counter clock wise. This looks better. I would not have known that if I did not enable this. The next image, I think, Straightened perspective will be really compelling, but I do want to bring more emphasis to the taxi. And so, again, by using the Subject, Quick Action, Lightroom is doing two things in this situation. It's making a very complex selection easy, and it identified the subject for us. And it happens to be that it is the case that the taxi is a subject. But it also applied a treatment.

And so I can adjust that treatment with this amount slider. And so it's just making my job a lot easier and faster. And again, I don't have to worry. If I'm not familiar with the masking tools, I don't have to worry about it because I can get this result with just one click.

And so we're good there. Now what I would do is I would go to crop. I would maybe bring it in a little bit tighter...

bring up the horizon there. And let's go back to Quick Actions because what I actually want to do again is I want to go to Recommended Presets. So the previous recommended preset I used, it was under the Subtle category. But sometimes I do want to go in a different direction. This is where another shining light of Recommended Presets makes itself really apparent because it'll help you maybe go into directions that you wouldn't have considered. I can guarantee you I would not go in this. Now this is too strong, but I love the direction that it's going.

It feels good. So I can go ahead. I can dial this down.

And even if I bring it to 0, it still has a treatment applied. So in terms of my own visual toolkit, I wouldn't have really ever seen this direction. So oftentimes what I do is I do jump into Recommended Presets and I see what the community does. It is such an awesome community. And so I am indebted. And again, I can click on more like this to see other versions, other variations of it. But now I can go ahead and all right, I got rid of that strong vignette, but I want a little bit more. So I can go to the editing panel here.

I can maybe add a bit more texture, a bit more clarity. Actually, that's too much. But then here, I can go and add more of a vignette. And the cool thing is about the vignette, this is a post-cropped vignette, meaning in the early, early, early, early days of Lightroom, when you would add a vignette, if you cropped, the vignette would not reapply itself to the crop. That's why it's called a post-cropped vignette. So now even though I cropped in, the edges here darken proportionally. And so we can see here that is our original cropped. I mean, not too shabby. Not too shabby. All right. Final image.

This is in Morocco. I can't remember which city. I was walking by and this guy was starting to call me over. Probably wanted me to buy a plate, but I figured I'm going to snap a photo of him first. So the only major distraction that I would remove here, remember, start with your distractions first, is this bicycle. And so I'm going to go ahead and just-- I'm not-- I mean, I'm on the trackpad. Usually, I'm using my Wacom tablet and stuff, so I'm just making my selection. Actually, I noticed I did not get that little bit of the bike. So I want to see what happens here.

It actually did a good job. Let me see. Let me turn on. I'm good with this. You see? That's-- Okay. Because I missed that tiny bit of the bicycle. In this case here, we're okay. But that right there, you see that right little bit on top of the wagon? You want to select everything. I'm not trying to even be dramatic. Let's delete this.

You want to make sure you get everything in Lightroom. Lightroom will understand. Lightroom's cool. And it'll be all right. I know what you need. You want to get rid of that bike. Cool. There's a blue door. Cool. There it is, the top of this cart. No problem. So make sure you make that selection. I'm actually glad I did that. I didn't intend to, but it worked out as a nice happy accent. Again, you could turn this off. Let's say these little crumbs and stuff on the street...

You can get rid of that stuff. I'm not going to spend too much time. But point is, that is where dust spots stuff. You can quickly-- With Generative Remove, you have to make your selection, let it process, and move on. All right, I mentioned how-- Let's do Auto and color. It does a great job. The perspective. So the perspective here is off, especially as you go from right to left. You see how the wall almost warps in. Check this out.

I mean, perfect. It levels it, and it makes everything rectilinear. It makes vertical lines truly vertical, and it makes the wall more flush with me, which just overall looks better. Also notice what we don't have. We don't have sky. We have subject. We do have people. So again, the Lightroom is looking, asking, "What's in this photo? What can I do to make it better?" I'm going to go ahead. I'm going to click on Pop.

Again, it selects a subject. Notice how he popped. Can adjust this. Now overall, his presence in the photo is small, his head is small. Oops.

So I'm not going to bother necessarily with skin or eyes, but I will enhance his clothing. I want to add a little bit more contrast to the clothing. And I can tell you that's not an easy thing to do, at least not in one click. And so I added more contrast and a little bit more detail to his clothing. And only his clothing, not his hand that's sticking out of his sleeve, not his head that's coming out, just his clothing.

I can also, let's say, I want to make the background a little bit softer. I want him to pop off. So I can click on Background blur. And so again, you see how Lightroom says estimating depth? It's building this depth map. It's determining what's closest to me and what's further away and then boom, we have a blurry background. And again, you can go as strong or as subtle as you want. Here, I generally go a little subtle.

And then we're really much good to go. Of course, I can go ahead and edit things. I can maybe make it a little bit brighter. I can add more contrast. I can do whatever I want. Again, I can also, big fan of vignettes, draw hue towards him.

But again, I'll close off with if-- What if I go to my Recommended Presets? What if I go to maybe Cinematic and I find something like this one? And I maybe back off a little bit, but still-- Whoa! Is there a doggy in here? Awesome. That's the first.

That's all good. I absolutely love dogs. But my point is that Recommended Presets is just such a wonderful way to-- It's just inspiring to find a new direction that I would-- And then you know what I usually do is I study this. I'm like, how-- I reverse engineered or at least I try to. How can I achieve this look? This is something you can grow into if you're still kind of new to Lightroom. But it's just really wonderful the way this stuff just defines itself just because I went through. And again, you can click on these. Some of them might not be your cup of tea, but it's just cool that this is here and it's in a single click. And again, I give so much credit to the members of the community here where they just share their own creative style. So let's wrap things up with five quick tips. And this is basically a recap. But again, first things first, most importantly, in bold, underline, if you're going to use Generative Remove tool first, do it before you crop.

Cool. Everyone's seeing photos of the slide. Good. Just because you will not get good results. As you've seen, I think I illustrated it intentionally and accidentally. You want to get rid of everything. Also, that includes shadows and reflections.

Subtlety is your friend. Remember, if you like just the overall look of a slider, or a Quick Action, or a preset, adjust the amount, and dial it in. And then make sure that you definitely dive into the Recommended Presets. Again, this is for subscribers to Lightroom. So if you're using the free version, use it, have fun with it, play around with it. If it's something you want to subscribe to, you are getting a wealth of stylistic presets. And then finally, don't forget, Quick Actions is there for you. It's there to help you out. But when you're ready, dive into the editing tools. There are plenty of resources that we have, so check them out.

If you don't have Lightroom I put this here. Most of you have Lightroom Mobile. If you scan this barcode and you have Lightroom installed, it's going to open it up on your phone. So if you don't have it, feel free to scan the QR code. I am grateful for you guys. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you for being here at MAX. I hope you enjoy the rest of your sessions and safe travels back home.

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