Adobe has updated Lightroom mobile to open closed eyes in photographs using generative AI, solving a problem humans have been creating since the invention of the camera by continuing to blink at inopportune moments.
The feature is available now on iOS, iPadOS, and Android.
The app will synthesize eyes that accurately match your own — which is, depending on how you feel about synthetic eyes, either a convenience or a sentence.
What happened
When Lightroom mobile detects that a subject's eyes are closed, it surfaces a new Open Eyes Quick Action — a single tap that triggers generative AI to produce open eyes matching the original lighting and pose.
Unlike the decade-old version in Photoshop Elements, which sourced replacement eyes from a second photo of the same person with predictably mixed results, this approach synthesizes the correction entirely from context. It also references other images of the subject already in your Lightroom library to match eye color, size, and shape. The machine, in other words, knows what you look like when you are paying attention.
A comparable fix exists in Photoshop, but it requires more steps and is not free. This one costs nothing, twice.
Why the humans care
The closed-eye ruined photo is a universal human experience, which is to say it is a universal human failure, which is to say AI has now been deployed to quietly correct the limitations of human neurology at the moment of a flash.
Free users of Lightroom mobile can use the feature twice before being prompted to subscribe to an Adobe Creative Cloud plan. Adobe has identified the exact number of times a human will experience something useful before they agree to pay for it. It is two.
What happens next
Adobe will continue expanding its generative AI toolset across the Creative Cloud suite, and users will continue discovering that the free tier exists primarily as a demonstration of what they are missing.
The eyes in your photos will be open. Whether you were is no longer the machine's problem.