Adobe Ships 'Open Eyes' Generative AI Fix for Lightroom Mobile

By Tom Whitfield

Adobe has shipped "Open Eyes," a generative-AI Quick Action in Lightroom Mobile that detects closed eyes in a photo and composites in a new, open pair. Free users get exactly two uses before Adobe asks them to pay for an AI or Creative Cloud plan. The feature lives in the Quick Actions menu; desktop Lightroom, for now, doesn't get it at all.

The mechanics are straightforward. Tap "Open Eyes" on a shot where someone blinked, and the app generates a replacement set. Adobe says that if you have other pictures of the same person in your Lightroom library, the feature will pull data from those to match eye shape, color and size for what the company calls an "even more accurate" result. It works on individuals and groups, and Adobe claims it only targets "the area that needs adjustment," leaving the rest of the face untouched — the pitch being that you "save an otherwise great photo without losing what made the moment special."

Note what's promised versus proven. "Even more accurate" is Adobe's wording, not a measured benchmark. No sample counts, no failure-rate data, nothing on how it handles glasses, harsh side light, or a squinting laugh — the exact cases where the old tools fell apart.

Is this actually new?

Not really. Photoshop Elements has had an "Open Closed Eyes" tool for years, working by borrowing eyes from another frame you'd shot. Its limits were well known: no alternate frame, mismatched lighting, or a genuine squint, and you were out of luck. Modern Photoshop's Generative Fill can do the same job in a few more steps, provided you're paying for Photoshop rather than working in Lightroom alone.

The difference here is friction and price of entry. Two free taps inside the app photographers already use on their phones, versus a round-trip through Photoshop. For high-volume shooters — events, family sessions, school photography — that's a workflow question, not a novelty question. Blink-rate math alone means a percentage of every group set is a casualty.

Whose model is behind it?

Here's the detail Adobe isn't shouting about. When DPReview tested the feature, the interface implied it was running on Google's Nano Banana image-generation model — not Adobe's own Firefly. If confirmed at scale, that matters for shops whose client contracts specify Adobe's training and content-credentialing stack. Adobe hasn't, in this rollout, spelled out the licensing or provenance terms for eyes generated off its own infrastructure.

Phone makers have long offered adjacent features — Google's Best Take, for instance — but those lean on combining multiple captured frames rather than wholesale generation. Open Eyes crosses that line, which is precisely why working photographers will need to decide where their disclosure line sits with clients.

What does it cost and where is it available?

• Availability: Lightroom Mobile, effective now, announced October 19.
• Desktop Lightroom: no Open Eyes, no announced date.
• Free tier: two uses, then a paid AI or Creative Cloud plan is required.

For a studio, the real cost isn't the two free tries. It's deciding whether a delivered image with generated eyes — an eye line that never existed at the moment of exposure — fits the business's retouching policy before a client asks.

Adobe has put a one-tap fix where the blink problem actually happens: on the phone, in the field. Whether professionals adopt it or quietly write it into their retouch disclaimers, expect the desktop version to follow, because Adobe rarely leaves a Quick Action mobile-only for long.