I have a complicated relationship with Adobe Camera Raw. For years I treated it like a tollbooth — something you pass through to get to the “real” editing in Photoshop. Open the RAW file, nudge the exposure, click Open Image, never look back. It wasn’t until a client job last spring, where I needed to make really precise localized adjustments on a portrait series without wrecking the flexibility of the RAW file, that I realized I’d been leaving one of ACR’s best tools completely untouched: the Masking brush, and specifically, RAW brushes designed to work inside it.

That’s what sent me down this rabbit hole, and eventually to this Kelvin Designs tutorial on how to use Photoshop RAW Brushes inside Adobe Camera Raw.

Why RAW Brushes Aren’t Just a Gimmick

Before we get into the how, let me make the case for the why. When you make adjustments with a brush inside Camera Raw, you’re doing something fundamentally different from painting on a layer in Photoshop. You’re applying parametric adjustments, not pixel-level changes. That means everything stays reversible, everything stays linked to the RAW data, and you can revisit and tweak without any quality loss. For portrait retouching, product photography, or any scene where you need selective exposure or color work, this is a genuinely powerful place to do it.

RAW brushes are preset brush settings that define how those local adjustments are applied. Think of them as saved configurations for the Masking tool’s Brush option, including things like feathering, density, flow, and any combination of exposure, color, or detail adjustments baked in.

Installing the Brushes (Don’t Skip This Part)

Kelvin walks through installation first, and it’s worth being explicit about this because it trips people up. You can grab his RAW brush set at kelvindesigns.com/photoshop-raw-brushes. Once downloaded, you’ll have an .xmp preset file or folder of them.

To install: open Photoshop, open any RAW file to launch Camera Raw, go to the Masking panel (the icon that looks like a dotted circle, in the toolbar on the right side of the ACR window), select Brush, and then look for the three-line menu icon near the brush settings. From there, you can import presets. Navigate to your downloaded files, select them, and they’ll appear in your preset list going forward. You only do this once. After that, the brushes live in Camera Raw permanently across sessions.

If you’re on an older version of Photoshop and don’t see the Masking panel in the same spot, it’s possible you’re running ACR before the interface was reorganized around version 13.2. Updating is worth it here, the newer masking tools are significantly better.

Walking Through the Editing Process

Once the brushes are installed, using them is straightforward but the workflow has a specific order that matters. In the tutorial, Kelvin opens a portrait photo in Camera Raw and starts with global adjustments first — basic exposure, white balance, that sort of thing — before reaching for the brushes. That sequencing is smart. You want your baseline dialed in before you start layering local tweaks, otherwise you’re chasing your tail.

From the Masking panel, select Brush. At the top of the brush options panel, you’ll see a dropdown or list of your installed presets. Choose the one appropriate for what you’re doing — there are presets built for skin smoothing, dodge and burn effects, targeted color grading, and more. Kelvin demonstrates a skin-focused brush that dials back texture and clarity slightly while lifting exposure just a touch, a combination that would take multiple layers and blend modes to replicate in standard Photoshop.

Paint over the area you want to affect. The red overlay shows you where the mask is being applied. Once you’re happy with the coverage, toggle the overlay off to see the actual effect. From there, you can fine-tune any of the underlying parameters manually — the brush preset gets you 90% of the way there, you adjust the last 10% by eye.

One key setting to pay attention to: Density. Kelvin keeps this high for most applications, around 80-100, which means the adjustment applies at full strength wherever you paint. Drop it lower if you want the effect to feel more subtle or graduated without having to repaint.

Where I’d Push This Further

Here’s my honest addition to what the tutorial covers: RAW brushes get even more useful when you use them on Smart Objects inside Photoshop. If you embed your RAW file as a Smart Object rather than opening it destructively, you can double-click the layer at any point to re-enter Camera Raw with all your brush masks still intact and fully editable. I’ve started doing this on almost every portrait job. It means your RAW edits aren’t locked when you flatten — you can revisit the masking months later if a client comes back with changes.

The one place this workflow falls down is speed. If you’re batch editing a hundred wedding photos, stopping to hand-paint local adjustments on each one isn’t realistic. In that case, Lightroom’s AI masking for subject and sky detection is honestly a better fit. RAW brushes inside ACR shine on single images where you’re spending real time on quality.

The Thing That Actually Changes How You Work

The shift here isn’t just a new tool — it’s treating Camera Raw as a legitimate editing environment rather than a waypoint. RAW brushes are the feature that finally convinced me to slow down in ACR instead of rushing past it.

Watch the full tutorial from Kelvin Designs to see the brush application process in action — the visual of painting the mask and watching the adjustment appear in real time is the part that makes it click.