Lightroom, DxO and Photoshop just drew three different AI lines

Quick answer: Adobe’s new Open Eyes tool in Lightroom mobile uses generative AI to fix a blink with one tap, free for two tries before it asks for a subscription. The same week, DxO shipped ViewPoint 6, which uses AI only to find a mask and insists it never invents a pixel, and Adobe is separately previewing a Photoshop light leak filter built with no AI at all. For a quick family-photo rescue, Lightroom mobile is free and fast. For precise geometry work on architecture or group shots, DxO ViewPoint 6 is the one worth the one-time fee.

Three releases, three opinions on what AI should touch

Three photo-editing stories landed within days of each other this October, and together they read like a quiet argument about where generative AI belongs in a photo editor. Adobe added a feature to Lightroom’s mobile app that uses generative AI to paint in a pair of open eyes where someone blinked. DxO released ViewPoint 6, a geometry and perspective tool that now uses AI to find a mask but is explicit that it does not generate anything new inside it. And Adobe, separately, is previewing a film-inspired light leak filter for Photoshop that the company is at pains to describe as not AI.

None of this is a coincidence of branding. It’s a sign that “AI” has stopped being a single feature and started being a design choice each company makes tool by tool, and it’s worth knowing which kind you’re getting before you reach for it.

Lightroom’s Open Eyes: a blink fix for everyone with a phone

Adobe has added an Open Eyes Quick Action to the mobile version of Lightroom for iOS, iPadOS, and Android, allowing users to correct photos in which one or more subjects have their eyes closed with a single tap, using generative AI to produce open-eye replacements that match the subject’s lighting, pose, and facial characteristics. Unlike the similar capability in Photoshop Elements, which has existed for nearly a decade and draws replacement eyes from other images of the same person, Lightroom’s implementation relies on AI and can reference other photos of the same individual in the user’s library to preserve natural consistency in eye color, size, and shape.

That distinction matters for anyone who has used the Elements version before. Earlier, people often used tools like Photoshop to copy eyes from one photo and place them in another; the new Lightroom feature automates that work, especially in the case of group images. It doesn’t need a second photo to work from at all, though quality improves when one is available.

Adobe announced the tool on October 19, available now in the Lightroom app for iOS, iPadOS and Android with no regional restrictions, though like the rest of Lightroom’s Quick Actions, Open Eyes does not yet appear in the desktop version and Adobe has not said whether it will arrive there. It rolled out alongside Generative Expand, a separate mobile tool for extending a frame beyond its original edges.

The free tier has a catch

Adobe is positioning this as a free feature, and in one sense it is. Open Eyes uses generative AI, so you need generative credits to use it, and you get two free tries before you have to pay. People on the free version of Lightroom mobile can use Open Eyes twice before the app asks them to subscribe to an Adobe AI or Creative Cloud plan, according to DPReview’s testing; Adobe’s own announcement calls the fix free in one tap and does not mention the cap. Worth knowing before you promise a client a quick fix.

There’s also a quality caveat worth flagging. Videomaker’s hands-on testing reported that the tool got the subject’s eye color wrong in one sample image, which lines up with Adobe’s own acknowledgment that results improve when reference photos of the same person are available in your library. Treat it as a rescue tool for an otherwise unusable frame, not a guaranteed match.

Once the free credits are gone, the cost runs through Creative Cloud. Adobe’s standard Lightroom Individual plan with 1TB of cloud storage lists at $11.99 a month with a 7-day free trial and 100 generative credits included each month, enough for routine use of Open Eyes and Lightroom’s other generative tools together.

DxO ViewPoint 6: AI that moves pixels, not invents them

DxO took the opposite stance in the same week. DxO announced ViewPoint 6, the latest version of its perspective correction software, calling it its “most precise version yet” thanks to new AI masking technology. The major update is AI-assisted masking in ReShape Fusion, the tool DxO introduced in ViewPoint 5 for moving, scaling, rotating and correcting individual parts of a photograph; in version 6, photographers can draw a rectangle around a subject and the software identifies the element inside and creates a mask following its outline.

The point of the feature is to avoid the usual trade-off in perspective correction. Conventional perspective tools work on the whole image, so straightening converging verticals tilts the entire picture plane and recovering a rectangle means cropping, with the stronger correction costing more image area; ViewPoint does not create pixels from scratch or generate pixels to fill in the edges, instead providing pixel-level control through a mesh on the original image. That “nothing invented” framing is deliberate marketing against the generative tools shipping elsewhere this year, and it’s a real functional difference: this is reshaping existing pixels with AI-guided precision, not painting new ones in.

ViewPoint 6 also works with RAW files directly and adds basic RAW editing tools including exposure compensation and white balance, so it’s no longer purely a plugin step; it can function as a lightweight standalone editor for the geometry-and-tone pass before a file heads elsewhere.

Availability and what it costs

ViewPoint 6 can be used as a standalone application or as a plugin for Adobe Lightroom Classic and Adobe Photoshop, available now for $129.99 (€119.99/£109.99) for new users or $84.99 (€74.99/£69.99) for ViewPoint 5 owners as a discounted upgrade, with a 30-day free trial also available. The software also supports plugin workflows with Capture One and integrates with PhotoLab 10. It’s a one-time perpetual license, not a subscription, which puts it on the opposite pricing model from Lightroom’s Open Eyes credits.

Reviewer reaction has been cautiously positive on the premise. Fstoppers called the use of AI to fix things within an image extremely innovative and unmatched by its competitors, and said it would be useful to people who make their living as photographers, though independent before-and-after testing beyond DxO’s own demo images hasn’t landed yet.

Photoshop’s light leak filter: the deliberate non-AI outlier

The third data point is smaller but tells the same story. Adobe is teasing an update to how filters work in Photoshop, including a new light leaks filter, with the teaser hidden inside an announcement of a partnership with Nvidia for GPU-accelerated editing. Currently Photoshop’s filters menu only applies changes to the active, visible layer, but a future version will let filters act more like a non-destructive layer that updates in real time on the canvas.

The light leaks filter itself ships with presets to get started quickly, lets you adjust pattern, strike amount and color with sliders in the Properties panel, and lets you adjust the size, rotation and center point of the leak directly on the canvas. Adobe’s own framing leans hard on the “not AI” label, which reads as a direct answer to the 2026 fatigue with generative tools: sometimes a filter is just a filter, built from procedural rules rather than a trained model, and Adobe wants that distinction known. No release date beyond “later this year” has been confirmed.

How the four approaches compare

Laid side by side, these tools sit on a spectrum from fully generative to fully rule-based, and the pricing models follow the same split: credit-metered subscriptions for the generative end, one-time or annual license fees for the rest.

Tool	What it fixes	AI approach	Platforms	Price	Best for
Lightroom mobile Open Eyes	Closed eyes in portraits and groups	Generative AI paints new eyes, guided by reference photos	iOS, iPadOS, Android	Free (2 uses), then Creative Cloud from $11.99/mo	Quick rescues on event and family shots
Photoshop Elements eye swap	Closed eyes, copied from another frame	Rule-based swap, no generative model	Windows, macOS	Included in Elements license	Desktop users with a backup frame to hand
DxO ViewPoint 6	Perspective and geometry on one element	AI finds the mask; correction reshapes existing pixels only	Windows, macOS; plugin for Lightroom Classic, Photoshop, Capture One; built into PhotoLab 10	$129.99 new, $84.99 upgrade, 30-day trial	Architecture, interiors, distorted group shots
Topaz Photo (Recover Faces)	Rebuilds detail in blurry, low-res or noisy faces	AI model trained to reconstruct facial structure	Windows, macOS; plugin for Lightroom Classic, Photoshop, Capture One, Affinity	$199/year Personal plan	Old scans, high-ISO portraits, print upscales

Where Topaz and Capture One fit

Topaz Labs sits closer to the DxO camp philosophically, in that its face-recovery models reconstruct detail that’s technically present but degraded, rather than inventing a scene from a text prompt. Topaz Labs’ own pricing page lists Topaz Photo at $199 a year for its Personal tier, which covers face recovery, denoising, sharpening and upscaling in one app. The Personal plan includes all of Topaz’s enhancement tools, including Recover Faces and Dust & Scratch, unlimited local and cloud rendering, and plugin support for Photoshop, Lightroom Classic, Capture One, Apple Photos, and Affinity. There’s no permanent free tier; Topaz ended its desktop trial and now offers only a 48-hour refund window instead.

Capture One, meanwhile, has no equivalent generative eye or face tool built in, and leans on its color science and tethering instead. Its Pro subscription runs around $18 a month on annual billing after a 6% price increase across its entire product suite that took effect from June 2, 2026, with a perpetual license still available for photographers who’d rather not subscribe at all. If your workflow is built around Capture One for tethered or studio work, DxO’s plugin support means ViewPoint 6 slots in without forcing a switch to Lightroom.

What this means for you

If you shoot events, weddings, or family sessions and just need to save a frame where someone blinked, Lightroom mobile’s Open Eyes costs nothing until your second use runs out, and the Creative Cloud plan it funnels you toward is reasonable if you already use Lightroom day to day. Don’t rely on it for a paying client’s hero shot without checking eye color against the original; the tool is good, not infallible.

If your problem is architectural distortion, stretched faces at the edge of a wide shot, or converging verticals that a global correction would ruin, DxO ViewPoint 6 is the more honest tool for the job: a one-time $129.99 fee with a 30-day trial to test it against your own files, and it plugs into Lightroom Classic, Photoshop or Capture One without requiring you to leave your main editor.

If you restore old photos or need to pull detail out of noisy, soft or low-resolution faces at volume, Topaz Photo’s $199 annual plan earns its keep faster than either of the above, but it’s a subscription now, not the one-time purchase it used to be. And if you’ve been waiting for Photoshop filters to behave like proper non-destructive layers, that update is coming later this year alongside the light leak filter, with no firm date yet from Adobe.