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Issue link: https://digital.macdirectory.com/i/1513481
Using AI, Lightroom can blur backgrounds and foregrounds and add a range of bokeh effects. There is a new group of tools to directly edit HDR images, and there’ve been some very noticeable performance improvements in many of Lightroom’s functions. Our favorite didn’t get much time at the keynote, perhaps because it is a bit of a challenge to explain. But you will notice that the HSL panel has been renamed the Color Mixer and therein lives Lightroom’s groundbreaking Point Color tool. Simply put, this lets you select a color or range of colors via an eyedropper and make radical or subtle changes to those colors. Once you get the hang of it, it is extremely useful for both artistic impact and basic repairs, such as the face that comes across as a little too florid or completely changing the color of an object in a photo. The mobile versions of Lightroom received a facelift with an eye to making its editing and organization features more easily accessible in the field. And the mobile version continues to get more and more desktop features. Vector Intelligence Adobe brought on Senior Design Manager Danielle Morimoto to show how the new Firefly Vector Model will help illustrators and keep up with steadily increasing demands for artwork. It brings to Adobe Illustrator some features that range from the useful to the startling. Retype can be a timesaver to a virtual lifesaver. It lets you select a font in an image, and it will search out the closest match and, if available, the font itself. Secondly, it uses its Firefly smarts to grab a font that had been converted to outline and turn it back into editable text. Generative Recolor (coming soon) goes a bit further and creates a color scheme from a text prompt, think “sunny day” or “garden flowers.” Receiving the biggest reaction from the audience is Illustrators new ability to create an entire vector graphic from a text prompt. You can select from Subject, Theme, Icon, and Pattern. The text prompt understands the kinds of language an illustrator or designer would use. These are all tagged as beta features but are available in the current production release. In Dialog with Firefly Adobe’s Senior Software Quality Engineer Dacia Saenz took the stage to let us know how the company’s video apps are moving forward on the wings of Firefly. We did a deep dive into the new Premiere Pro and After Effects features in our last issue, but we’ll recap briefly here. Premiere’s new smarts will be of greatest benefit to editors who work with a lot of dialog. The program can now spot filler words, the umm’s and ah’s, and either individually or globally remove them. To help you find them (and patch the resulting jump cuts) they are represented as ellipses (…) in the text panel. The other new AI feature is Enhance Speech. If you discover that your primary mic failed, Premiere can create (synthesize) a replacement voice track based on what it can hear from a secondary mic, mixing in as much or little ambient sound as desired. After Effects for 2024 introduces a retooled, smarter, and faster Roto Brush that should make working with this powerful tool faster and easier. Control over text and font effects now have hooks into After Effects’ scripting tools that brings the promise of expanded text manipulation and animation for the program’s more advanced users.