Photoshop’s AI subject selection now handles portraits with ease

Now that a lot of creative professionals are working from home, Adobe is adding new features to Creative Cloud apps to help you collaborate or share your projects with others. Of course, there are a number of new features for your everyday work, too. Perhaps the most interesting addition is an AI-powered selection feature for portraits that will save you a ton of time.

Inside Photoshop on the desktop, the company has massively improved the Select Subject tool. Select Subject Portrait will help you better isolate people from the background, even if they have long hair that can be difficult to grab via other methods. As you might expect, the feature is powered by Adobe’s Sensei AI, which does all the heavy lifting when it comes to selecting individual strands of hair or other details. Before now, Select Subject grabbed more of a rough shape, but Adobe added more “brain power” that detects the type of object before employing “specialized selection techniques” according to the content. That’s specifically with the goal of doing a better job with hair. Thanks to the tech, you can get some fine-tuned selections with a click, saving several minutes, or even hours, worth of work.

With Lightroom, Adobe has added the ability to easily pass along your step-by-step workflow. Share Edits will task Lightroom with automatically saving both your original image and the final product, complete with all the changes you made along the way. Not only can others see the process, but they can also save the edits as a preset for their own work. Share Edits is currently only available in Lightroom for Mac and Windows.

Lightroom now offers Local Hue controls as well, so you can make super detailed tweaks to things like skin tone without altering the entire image. The tool is available in Adobe Camera Raw, Lightroom Classic and Lightroom on Mac, Windows, Android and iOS. There’s also a new Versions option (pictured above) that will let you apply different edits to the same file, keeping any you’re happy with along the way (available in Lightroom for Mac, Windows, Android and iOS). And lastly, Lightroom on iPad users can now send images to Photoshop on the iPad for more options. This means you can easily jump over to more robust editing and retouching tools without even having to switch from tablet to desktop. When you’re done, you can either send the image back to Lightroom or keep it as a cloud document.

To keep your skills sharp, the company is doubling the amount of Adobe Live daily content from 5 to 12 hours. This is where “influential creatives” offer tutorials or challenges for the wider community. The expansion will also include local artists in the UK, France and Germany. It’s no surprise the company has seen increased viewership in the midst of a pandemic, but it’s also nice to see Adobe add more content and more ways to view it. In fact, the Adobe Live streams will be available inside the Creative Cloud mobile app. The same place you access files, fonts and more will be the spot to check out these sessions on the go.

Speaking of livestreams, Adobe Fresco on iPad will soon have the ability for anyone to broadcast while they work inside the drawing and painting app. The tool is already out in beta, and Adobe says in the last quarter people have watched over 4 million minutes of livestreamed creative work. Like Adobe Live, streams inside Fresco will allow you to share your process and techniques with other artists and illustrators.