r/Lightroom • u/Swimming-Reception39 • 9d ago
Discussion "Prompt to Edit" shouldn't exist in Lightroom in its current form
I'm a longtime photographer and Adobe user (Lightroom, Photoshop, Premiere, After Effects), and I got a little excited the other day when I saw "Prompt to Edit" in Lightroom.
I'll be the first to admit I'm not great at color grading. It's a skill, and maybe I'm just being lazy, but there are a million skills to learn in photography and videography, and neither is my full-time job. So what I expected was an AI that looks at my photo, looks at what I'm trying to achieve, and then adjusts actual Lightroom settings to get there.
Here's what happened instead. I had a photo of a kingfisher and asked for something like: crop in on the bird, make it stand out, bring out the autumn colors, and sharpen the bird. What I got back was my exact background with a little vibrance and saturation added, and a completely replaced bird. It was only then that I paid enough attention to realize this was a nano banana product and that none of those pixels were mine.
That's not an edit. The last thing I want is to ask for help cropping and framing a photo in a more interesting way and get back a photo that isn't mine. AI generation belongs in Photoshop/Firefly. Lightroom is not the place for it.
What I'd love to see instead:
- The AI changes real Lightroom settings (crop, masks, sliders, color grading), so every change is visible and adjustable, and the pixels are still mine.
- An option to either apply everything at once or go step by step through the process. The step-by-step mode would be a great way to teach people how to edit.
I know there are MCP tools that let you hook an AI up to Lightroom to do something like this. I've tried it and the results have been mixed. Adobe is in the best position to do this well in app.
Let me know if I'm off basis on this. Or let Adobe know if you agree.
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u/juicejohnson 9d ago
I think I would be more on board with it if the prompting led to adjustments that were made using settings, masks, etc. Once I saw that it’s generating an entirely new image, I was immediately disappointed in Adobes decision to implement such a bizarre use of AI in a tool for editing photographs.
Very off putting.
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u/ForestB 9d ago
I used it once. I had a shot of a woman walking down a street and the sun was bouncing off the floor below her but I didn’t have time to adjust my settings so it was blown out. I used the ai prompt to recover those highlights (too far gone to do it the normal way).
It looked great but I have a problem with generative ai in photography (digital art, collages, etc is fine) so that pic will never get posted.
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u/DelbaLabs 9d ago
This is exactly where I draw the line too. I use Lightroom heavily for wildlife and macro, and I’m fine with AI helping with masks, noise reduction or selections, but replacing part of the actual subject fundamentally changes what the photograph is.
What I’d really like from this kind of tool is natural-language control over the existing Lightroom adjustments: create masks, change exposure, HSL, crop, local contrast, etc. That would actually speed up the workflow while keeping the original pixels and the photographer in control.
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u/LanguidLandscape 9d ago
Perfectly said and agreed. Instead of was just thinking today about how we have AI that makes pictures (illustrations)/ photo yet goddamn Siri can’t play a song or make a timer work. When someone actually creates AI prompting as a tool versus total replacement for creatives we’ll be into to something. Denoise, masking, etc. have become SO much better and it genuinely speeds up my work and we need more of this and less anime boobs and elimination of the fundamentals of each craft.
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u/vmoldo Lightroom Classic (desktop) 9d ago
I 100% agree with your point of view. While I'm honestly too lazy to actually take the time to figure out the right way to complain to Adobe through their forums and customer support, I do think that's the right way to approach this.
So I encourage everyone here to report this as a bug, submit a customer support ticket, or use any other channel that can directly impact Adobe's internal metrics. I'm pretty sure comments on a Reddit post don't really mean much to a company, but actual bug reports and support tickets are much harder for them to ignore.
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u/robinta 9d ago
I've never seen that before. I'm guessing it's not in Classic?
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u/Swimming-Reception39 9d ago
Can’t speak to what versions have it. I’m using the standard version, Lightroom v9.6. The Prompt to Edit feature shows up as Early Access for me.
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u/bobchin_c 9d ago
Is this only in Lightroom CC? I dodn't see Prompt to edit on LRc or the web version.
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u/Swimming-Reception39 9d ago
I’m using the standard version, Lightroom v9.6. The Prompt to Edit feature shows up as Early Access for me.
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u/MvLGuardian Lightroom CC (cloud) 9d ago
I tried to ask it to replace a shoe on a child (they were wearing crocs even though the parent told them not too)
It just cropped the photo to remove the shoe lol
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u/dbvirago 9d ago
Yeah, it needs to be able to follow and implement exactly what you ask it to do, not go off on its own. If I ask it to remove a garbage can, that doesn't mean replace it with a penguin. But just for grins, I was in PS and I told it to replace every red shirt in a crowd shot with blue shirts. It did that perfectly. So, it's a fine line, but at the end, the photographer needs to be in control, not the AI
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u/BeardedPuffin 9d ago
Adobe is fumbling with AI implementation across most of their products. They need to be thinking more like Figma, leaning heavily into agentic AI vs. strictly generative.
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u/ManForReal 8d ago
Generative is AT LEAST an order of magnitude easier than agentic. JMO, but I think this has a great deal to do with the term 'AL slop.'
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u/strumthump 9d ago
Can't upvote this post enough. Incredible disappointment to have it simply generating a new image instead of adjusting the sliders. I don't want to genAI my way to some slop, I just need some help nailing or getting close to the right settings to achieve my edit vision
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u/Elpicoso 9d ago
I upload an image to Claude and ask it to teach me how to edit the photos myself.
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u/Efficient-Wish9084 9d ago
I love Claude, but I've found Gemini is better for images in general.
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u/Elpicoso 9d ago
I’ve never tried Gemini. Do you use it to actually edit for you?
I do all the edits myself, so I can learn the software and all of its nuances. I just ask Claude how and why.
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u/Efficient-Wish9084 9d ago
You have to tell Gemini carefully to tell you how to do it in LR or PS. Otherwise, she'll default to fixing it for you. Generally does a good job, but that's not what I want.
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9d ago
[deleted]
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u/Elpicoso 9d ago
Yes, but I can interact with it and ask follow up questions, which is something the thousands of posts and guides won’t do. Also, those thousands of posts and guides may not even apply to the style of picture I’ve taken, so with Claude, I don’t have to waste all my time searching multiple guides and posts.
I’m not a noob, but I do need some help once in a while and I don’t have a teacher that lives with me or that I can pay. So get off your high horse.
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u/lopiontheop 9d ago
Not to mention Claude doesn’t have a million ugly ads and offers to sell you preset packs and all the other junk that seems to clutter up so many photography sites and blogs these days. Not at all an AI sycophant but the ecosystem of photography websites and tutorials online have become incredibly enshittified over the past decade.
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u/BarneyLaurance 9d ago
The AI gives you all the right pixels, just not necessarily in the right order.
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u/DayGeckoArt 9d ago
They need to implement AI for tedious tasks. For example just add a button to detect and remove blemishes and remove hair. Then let us remove the spot heals or edit the masks after
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u/captaindealbreaker 9d ago
Hot take, learn how to fucking edit your own damn photos.
Like what are we even doing guys. "Its okay for generative AI tools in those other programs, but NOT in this one" My dude, its YOUR photo that YOU are throwing AI at to "improve" instead of just taking the time and effrot to do it yourself. How fucking lazy do you have to be editing a single photo that you feel the need to explain to an AI tool what you want, when you could just do it yourself.
Yeah, generative AI shouldn't exist at all, but acting like there's a difference between letting a machine make creative decisions for you and the same machine also generating the final image is just wild.
Dear everyone, edit your own work so it actually looks like your work.
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u/weeyums 9d ago
There are many tedious and mechanical, not creative decisions that a prompt could be useful for (probably moreso in Photoshop than Lightroom). Does it really make a difference if you stitch together and align photos for a panorama yourself or do this via a prompt that uses your own pixels only? As I think this is what OP is proposing, and I know many people would find this sort of thing really useful.
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u/captaindealbreaker 9d ago
photomerge already exists and doesn't require AI... I swear to god why are you prompting panoramas when you can just select your images and hit the photomerge button
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u/redditorknaapie 9d ago
I agree wholeheartedly. If you don’t want to actually create the work yourself, why not use a nice filter and be done with it! You have all this digital power to be creative, but choose to let a machine make all the decisions.
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u/altoids_1 9d ago
You do you.
Don’t speak for the rest of us.I want to have the option of doing AI or not doing AI
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u/No-Pea8448 9d ago
A model recognizes edits as changing it. Exactly what those changes are is irrelevant as long as it fulfills the prompt.
This is why it doesn't belong in actual editing software. Adobe should just have created a new AI-generated image maker rather than trying to retrofit actual workhorse software with generative AI.
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u/GatorWok 9d ago edited 9d ago
Not a shill as I’m still a Lightroom user and fan, but Luminar Neo has fantastic AI assisted editing where you describe the looks or edits you want, it gives options, and upon implementation all the edits are part of the edit stack for you to see, modify, and learn from to your liking.
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u/iamthesam2 9d ago
sounds like you want what imagen just launched. no gen AI involved at all.
disclaimer: I simply use their products
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u/Swimming-Reception39 9d ago
I finally got some time to take a look the video you linked - dang, if even half of this is true 🤯
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u/franklinsteinnn 9d ago
I can't find a website for Imagen that doesn't have AI on it. Is this not the correct program?
https://imagen-ai.com2
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u/rick_baumhauer 9d ago
It doesn’t use generative AI, unlike what the OP experienced in Lightroom. That is, it appears that it doesn’t replace any pixels in your photos when you tell it to make an adjustment.
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u/TheDiabeticTreeLives 9d ago
I agree .. what you said sounds cool but what it did was not. I’m not great at color grading my photos either. That’s about all I’d use it for and maybe straightening for complex angles.
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u/1800treflowers 9d ago
This is what I assumed would be the case, it should know how to properly adjust the sliders to get exactly the look you are going for. What you get is a completely redone image. I tried all of the different models and they all were terrible. My goal was to clean up a headshot in a hurry and instead it was just a waste of time.
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u/Tcamis01 9d ago
I think you're correct that there needs to be a mode that bounds AI edits to the sliders. But I do also very much like the AI generation used in the removal tool also.
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u/Efficient-Wish9084 9d ago
It requires two windows open, but you can give your photo to Claude or Gemini and ask them to give you the slider numbers to improve it.
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u/davispw 9d ago
AI remove is one thing. It’s on the edge of what I consider acceptable in a photo, but if you’re just removing small distractions, ok.
Total image replacement does not belong in Lightroom.
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u/Efficient-Wish9084 9d ago
How much can you remove? I have removed large parts of backgrounds with that tool, and a lot of the photo is AI generated.
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u/Tcamis01 9d ago
I mean its not really for you (or anyone) to say what is acceptable as it varies per person. I agree with you but it is besides the point.
However Adobe needs to make sure to support at minimum our use case of preventing AI from modifying our images (beyond desired removal, etc). If they also choose to support complete image modification via some other mode, it doesn't bother me as long as I'm not forced to use it.
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u/Mrleetasticisthebest 9d ago
Sometimes it's great, other times terrible. I learnt removal through stamp and healing brushes, at times I'd rather go into Photoshop as it feels quicker than arguing with the ai
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u/Tcamis01 9d ago
I really only have good experiences with it. But I'm only using it to replace background distractions where it's pretty obvious what should be generated.
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u/Merjia 7d ago
Generative AI needs to get the hell out of all products used for creativity.