Adobe’s new Open Eyes quick action reconstructs closed eyes in portraits, but free users can try it only twice before needing an AI or Creative Cloud subscription.
Adobe has added an “Open Eyes” quick action to Lightroom Mobile, extending its growing set of AI-assisted portrait tools. The feature is designed to repair photos where one or more subjects blinked, generating open eyes while trying to preserve the person’s overall look. Adobe says the system identifies closed eyes automatically and, when other images of the same person are available, can use them to match eye colour, shape and size more closely. According to Adobe, the aim is to help users rescue group shots and candid moments that would otherwise be unusable.
The feature sits inside Lightroom Mobile’s Quick Actions workflow, the same part of the app that already handles automatic image improvements and portrait retouching. Adobe’s help pages describe Quick Actions as an AI-driven set of edits that can adjust specific elements of a photo, including people, skies and other detected areas, with minimal manual work. That broader system also includes retouching controls for facial features, skin, hair, teeth and clothing, showing how Adobe is steadily pushing more editing tasks into guided, machine-assisted tools.
The company’s latest addition also reflects a broader shift in Lightroom towards generative editing. Adobe previously introduced Generative Remove in Lightroom, a Firefly-powered tool that can erase unwanted objects across mobile, web and desktop versions. By comparison, Open Eyes is narrower in scope, but it pushes further into image reconstruction rather than simple adjustment. During testing, the interface appeared to suggest a third-party image generation model rather than Adobe’s own Firefly system, although Adobe’s public announcement describes the feature in terms of AI-based detection and correction rather than naming the underlying model.
There are limits, though. Adobe is making the feature available in the free version of Lightroom Mobile only twice before asking users to move to an AI or Creative Cloud subscription. The feature is also, at least for now, confined to the mobile app rather than the desktop edition. That makes it a small but notable example of how image-editing software is moving from correction towards synthesis: a practical convenience for some users, but also a reminder that the boundary between captured and generated photography is becoming harder to define.
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