Many of the high jinks in the sitcom Seinfeld would be impossible today. The character George Costanza, for example, was plagued by an answering machine tape, which no one uses anymore, and was duped into buying John Voight's car, which could've been avoided with a simple Google search.

In the final season, Costanza realizes he's in the background of his new boss' vacation photo and goes to great lengths to airbrush himself out. Today, image removal technology would've made his life much easier — and the episode much shorter.

One of his options might be Adobe's photo-editing app Lightroom, which as of Tuesday has access to the generative AI tool Firefly. This brings new functionality, like Generative Remove and Lens Blur features. 

"It's not that long ago that this would have been hours of work in Photoshop," said Benjamin Warde, senior product manager of Lightroom.

The integration is live as of Tuesday for desktop and mobile devices.

In an April update to Firefly itself, Adobe promised better images and easier prompts when working directly with the tool. Firefly has been used to create 8 billion images since it came out a little over a year ago, according to Adobe data. However, the Photoshop maker is now seeing increased competition from tech companies like Google and OpenAI, which have their own gen AI tools capable of image and video generation and edits.

Generative Remove

Adobe's Generative Remove tool is now available as an early-access feature in Lightroom. It'll be more broadly available later this year. Adobe didn't specify a date.

If, like Costanza, you've ever been confronted by a photo that includes someone you wish you could delete, you're in luck. Generative Remove lets you take out any unwanted object from a photo. You simply toggle on the new generative AI switch, brush around the object you want to delete, and voila.

Adobe

According to a press release, the AI integration helps Lightroom better fill in whatever was removed so it matches the background in the photo.

Of course, there are AI-based alternatives, such as Google's Magic Editor photo-editing tools, which are available for free for Google Photos users, as well as on Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 Pro devices. And Samsung's Galaxy S24 smartphones boast AI-powered tools like Generative Edit, which also helps you remove objects from photos and fill in the background.

Though Lightroom has long had a removal tool, Warde noted that it previously worked best on "smaller, simpler things," like taking out a dust spot, or a blemish on a face. But when it came to larger areas with more complex backgrounds, it struggled to fill in the area by "just pulling pieces from elsewhere in the photo."

With the addition of Firefly, however, Lightroom is able to more intelligently consider the context of the scene and generate new content instead of sampling from elsewhere in the image.

"It's essentially saying, 'Well, what would this picture have looked like if that thing you're trying to remove hadn't been there when you took the picture?'" Warde said.

In the early access period, Adobe is soliciting feedback from photographers so it can improve the AI model. When the feature becomes generally available, its Content Credentials feature will be added to resulting images to call out that they've been modified.

Lens Blur

Adobe is also making a Lens Blur tool generally available across all devices, with new presets to help add depth effects like blur to photos, which help put the subject in sharper focus.

"This is something that professional photographers do all the time in order to highlight the subject in their image and really draw your attention," Warde said. "Normally accomplishing that requires a camera with a large sensor and a lens with a large aperture and so on, but that doesn't describe the cameras that most of us use most of the time."

The feature was first announced in October.

After using AI to analyze the photo and create a 3D map to understand the distance between the elements within the image, Lightroom allows you to add this shallow depth of field. You can use the tool to apply more or less blur to different parts of the scene based on how close or how far away they are from the camera, Warde said.

Preset blur options are also available, along with a slider to ramp up or down the amount of blur that you want to apply.