Adobe Camera RAW has added several incredible AI-based tools in the past year, including:

• AI denoise
• Adaptive profiles
• Generative expand
• Generative AI remove
• AI masks to select the sky, background, objects, subject, and people
• Lens blur

It’s an incredible lineup of tools which work directly on the RAW, which allows results which are not only higher quality, but also non-destructive. And this second benefit has created a bit of a new conundrum. Your AI edits may interact with each other and require updating. For example, if you use the generative AI remove tool, you might need to update parts of your AI select sky mask to reflect new image content. As a result, you may sometimes see ACR show a button in the top left prompting you to “Update AI Settings“. This shows when you make an edit which requires updating existing AI edits in the image. If you don’t click to update the content, you might have significant problems (such as a bad sky mask).

While it would be amazing if these updates could happen automatically, there are several reasons why it is probably not practical for ACR to do this for you:

1. Some of these AI tools run in the cloud and you might be offline. For example, you must be connected to the internet to use the generative remove tool.
2. Performance may not be ideal. Some of these tools take several seconds (or much longer on older computers) and you probably wouldn’t want ACR to get locked up too often. Consider AI denoise: moving the amount slider requires updates to other AI content and you probably wouldn’t want a delay every time you move that slider. Better to tweak the amount and then let things like sky masks update once.
3. Battery life or fan noise may be a problem if ACR was constantly updating AI content, as this requires significant CPU / GPU resources.

Perhaps we’ll see the need for updates reduced over time as Adobe continues to improve the AI tools, but these considerations probably won’t go away entirely. Either way, it’s part of the workflow required now to take advantage of these great tools.

Follow ACR’s order of operations for more efficient workflows:

Now that you understand why we need to manually update the AI content, it’s important to know how you can manage it effectively. There are a couple of key principles to know:

• You must click “Update AI Settings” button to ensure you do not have artifacts.
  • However, you don’t have to click it right away, just before you’re done editing the RAW to ensure the final output is ok.
  • You can also click just the circular arrow to update one step at a time, which is mostly helpful for educational purposes (to see which update causes which change).
• If you edit in the same order the AI works, you’ll save a lot of time (and can avoid the update button).
  • There is an order of operations to the AI. For example, denoise is always done before the other AI tools.
  • Anytime you impact one of the earlier steps, the later ones must be redone.

If you click the down arrow on the update AI settings button, ACR will show you the preferred order of operations. Anytime you change something higher on the list, everything below it must be redone. So the ideal order for you to work if you wish to avoid AI updates is:

1. Denoise. While this is non-destructive, it is particularly ideal to get this slider right before you do any generative expand or remove (as redoing those can create artifacts and requires careful review).
2. Generative expand. Due to resolution limits, you may not use this much yet. If you’re using this feature for a social export, you might want to do this on a duplicate layer/image – as you probably don’t want to commit to this yet for a full resolution image you might print.
3. Generative remove. So ideally, you should deal with AI-based “cloning” before you start working on things like a sky mask.
4. Lens blur.
5. Adaptive profile. This tends to be fairly safe, as changes above won’t cause big changes here.
6. Local masks. These tend to be fairly safe to update without causing problems, but it’s always ideal to review the details for any AI-based mask (which includes the first group of options under “create new mask”).

If you had to boil it down to the most important lesson: always do AI denoise first and try not to change it later. It’s great that you can if you need to, but you’ll save yourself a lot of work reviewing other local AI details if you don’t revisit denoise. Any time you change it, you may force updates to gen remove / expand, which need close attention to ensure you don’t introduce unwanted changes.

Overall order of operations for LR / ACR

Here is the recommended order for editing overall (not just AI):

1. HDR
2. Denoise, Raw Details, Super Resolution
3. Reflections Removal
4. Distracting People Removal
5. Generative Expand (Currently available only in Adobe Camera Raw as Tech Preview)
6. Generative Remove, Content-Aware Remove, Heal, and Clone
7. Lens Blur
8. Lens Profile
9. Crop and Transform
10. Adaptive Profiles
11. Global Adjustments
12. Masking

For more info, see Adobe’s support page.