At Home with Tech

AI can effortlessly and perfectly select the people in your photos to individually brighten and edit. Here’s how to access this superpower using your iPhone and Adobe Lightroom.

I don’t travel about taking family photos with my own team of lighting professionals and a heavy bag of prime lenses (I wish). I typically just use the camera baked into my smartphone, which as you know is my trusty iPhone.

Sure, I sometimes get more ambitious and bring my GoPro, my Panasonic Lumix LX-10 or Lumix ZS200 with its bigger zoom. But my iPhone 15 Pro Max has a great camera system. And best of all, it’s always with me.

So, like the rest of us, most of my photography is generated through my phone.

When the Light is your Enemy
Even though my iPhone’s camera skills are admirable, the world usually doesn’t present perfect conditions to capture an optimal photo. Often, the lighting is not quite right.

Your subject can often look dark. Sure, my iPhone can sometimes handle this challenge. But it has problems (as does any camera) when my subject isn’t as well-lit as other parts of the frame. A similar limitation develops when the background is too bright (such as when your subject stands in front of a window with sun pouring in).

Then you’ve got yourself a silhouette shot, which is the opposite of what you probably wanted.

Yes, you can try to reframe, but that’s not always possible. The only option is to snap the photo and then try to fix it in post.

The Former Limits of Photo-Editing Solutions
There are any number of photo editing software options where you can brighten your photo to pump up how your subject appears. (Your smartphone will do this in one click.) But that can often start to overexpose the other parts of your image that are already sufficiently bright.

Professional photo editing programs can enable you to just select a portion of your photo to enhance, but there’s not been a one-click solution… until recently.

How to Brighten the People in your Photos using the AI in Adobe Lightroom
I use Adobe Lightroom Classic to organize and enhance my photos. The software now offers the ability to perfectly isolate and select people in photos with just one click. Being able to accomplish that used to take years of training and practice with complex software.

But with the power of Adobe Sensei AI, Lightroom does all that for you. Then you can easily pump up how the people in your photo look.

Here’s how:

• In Develop mode, click on the circular Masking Tool on the top right. That’s your entry point.

On the top of your options, there are three boxes you can click to select:

• Subject
• Sky
• Background

The AI-powered Masking Tool immediately isolates a perfect cut out and adds a mask that you can brighten, darken or adjust in any number of ways. If there are several people in your photo, and you want to enhance the look of just one, you can click on ‘People’ to select that individual.

It’s amazing.

Two Examples of Lightroom’s Masking Tool in Action
Here’s one example of using the Masking Tool to pump up the light and color saturation of just the two people in my shot overlooking Exit Glacier in Alaska’s Kenai Fjords National Park.

Brighten the People

And here’s another example where I used the Masking Tool to brighten this somewhat hidden young moose I spotted while biking near Anchorage.

Brighten the Moose

It’s not a perfect shot but being able to actually see the moose more clearly with the help of AI certainly improves it.

• A warning: Clicking-in more light onto your subjects should be a subtle enhancement. Otherwise, it will look fake. So, sprinkle in your extra light sparingly.

Add Buttery Bokeh Blur Using your iPhone’s Portrait Mode
Once, you’ve got your photo subjects properly ‘re-lit,’ then you can focus on editing the backgrounds in your shots. A relatively new AI trick you can use is adding in background blur or ‘bokeh.’

This nifty visual effect used to be achievable only while taking photos with a more traditional camera in bright light using the right lens and aperture setting. Now you don’t have to be an expert photographer to get some bokeh. AI can create the same effect in post!

An iPhone camera’s Portrait Mode setting is designed to do exactly that. The iPhone’s software in the Photos app isolates the background from your subject, allowing you to dial in your background blur. You can snap away and then later choose to add bokeh (as long as the photo was originally taken in Portrait Mode).

This feature has been a game changer for me.

• Another warning: You might want to dial back the amount of your iPhone’s auto bokeh level setting (Yes, you can do that.). Sometimes, just a subtle background blur is all you need. Too much may make the background look like it’s a complete digital replacement.

Three Levels of Bokeh
Here are three examples adding different levels of bokeh in Portrait Mode on my iPhone. I took this selfie while I was shopping for a new pair of reading glasses. You don’t need to see the optometrist office background. So, I thought it was a perfect opportunity to blur it out. But how much bokeh is the right level? You decide…

Lens Blur in Lightroom Classic
Adobe Lightroom Classic can perform the same bokeh trick with its new Lens Blur feature. In one click, you can create a depth map of your photo using Adobe Sensei. From that point, you can tinker further to adjust the scope of the blur.

Is It Cheating to Use AI to Improve your Photos?
The technology to digitally adjust your photos has been around for years. But some of the tricks were complex to pull off. The big change now is AI can do much of the same work for you with just a few clicks.

Should you feel like all of this is somehow cheating? Are you not really a good photographer, because you couldn’t originally capture your shot perfectly, and you need AI to save you?

Please.

If you’re a Luddite, maybe. Otherwise, this is simple technological progress.

Time to get on board and use some AI-oomph to make your photos shine brighter!