I think we can recognize that tech companies are implementing artificial intelligence features as an excuse to raise their product prices. Adobe did that just today in raising the subscription price of its creative suite. Users will be forced to pay more for AI features with debatable usefulness. Maybe these companies can cloak the upcoming tariff price increases under the guise of AI!
To Adobe’s credit, there is an AI feature of its Lightroom suite that I recently found to be utterly incredible.
This past weekend I shot photos at a wedding reception. A Chinese restaurant in the evening is about the worst lighting conditions this side of a nightclub. Because I was photographing people, I had to maintain high shutter speed (to avoid motion blur). Nor could I shoot at wide open aperture because the focal plane would be too narrow for a group shot. High ISO was the only remedy, which meant lots of noise in the output.
Enter the AI denoise function introduced in Lightroom back in 2023. With a single click of a button, and a slider to choose how strong, the high ISO photos I took came out clean and sharp, like freaking magic. (On my now dated M1 Max MacBook Pro, to denoise a single RAW photograph took about 30 seconds.) No more messing with manual noise reduction sliders and guessing what each of them actually do. Never again will I fear bumping the ISO setting to the limits (dynamic range tradeoffs aside).
I went back to some other high ISO photos I’ve shot over the years just to mess with it some more. For sure AI tools can be gimmicky, but when they do perform seemingly miracles, I’ve no issue paying more.
Zero noise reduction.
Adobe Lightroom AI denoise.