I’ll be honest. For years I treated Adobe Camera Raw like a tollbooth, somewhere I paid my dues adjusting exposure and white balance before getting into Photoshop proper. The idea of doing serious, targeted retouching inside ACR never really crossed my mind. Then a portrait job backed me into a corner, the skin tones were a mess across thirty-plus shots, and I needed a repeatable, non-destructive workflow that didn’t involve me manually masking every single face. That’s when I found RAW brushes, and specifically, this Kelvin Designs tutorial on how to actually use them.

If that doesn’t load:

What RAW Brushes Actually Are (And Why They’re Not Regular Brushes)

RAW brushes are not Photoshop brushes in the traditional sense. They don’t paint color or texture onto a layer. Instead, they store a combination of Adobe Camera Raw settings, things like exposure, clarity, color temperature, and skin tone adjustments, inside a brush preset that you apply locally using ACR’s Masking tools. Think of them as saved correction recipes you can paint onto specific areas of a RAW file before you ever open the image in Photoshop. The non-destructive angle is real here. Everything stays editable, and nothing is baked into pixels.

That distinction matters a lot in a production context. When a client asks you to revisit an image two weeks later and tweak the skin tone, you’re not digging through flattened layers or trying to remember which adjustment layer did what. You open the RAW file, adjust the brush mask, done.

Installing the Brushes: Faster Than You Think

Kelvin walks through the installation process early in the tutorial, and it’s genuinely simple. You download the preset files from his site (linked in the video description), and then you drop them into the correct Camera Raw presets folder on your machine. On a Mac, that lives inside your Library folder under Application Support > Adobe > Camera Raw > Settings. Windows users will find it under AppData > Roaming > Adobe > Camera Raw > Settings.

Once the files are in place, relaunch Photoshop or just reopen Camera Raw, and the brushes show up automatically inside the Presets panel. No importing wizard, no plugin nonsense. If you’ve ever installed Lightroom presets, this is the same idea, same folder structure, same logic.

Painting Corrections With the Masking Tool

Here’s where the workflow gets interesting. Inside Adobe Camera Raw, open your image and head to the Masking panel (the icon looks like a dotted circle, it’s in the right-hand toolbar). Choose Brush from the masking options. Before you paint anything, load your RAW brush preset by clicking the three-dot menu inside the brush settings and selecting the preset you want. Kelvin’s pack includes presets specifically built for skin retouching, dodging, burning, and color correction tasks.

With your preset loaded, you’re now painting a mask onto the image. The brush settings work the way you’d expect: Size controls how large the brush is, Feather softens the edges of your mask, Flow affects how strongly the correction builds up as you paint, and Density is essentially the opacity of the final mask. For skin work, Kelvin recommends keeping Feather fairly high (around 70-80) so corrections blend naturally rather than leaving hard edges, and dropping Flow to somewhere in the 30-50 range so you can build up gradually.

Paint over the area you want to affect, and ACR applies whatever correction parameters are baked into that brush preset to only the pixels you’ve covered. You can see the mask overlay in red by pressing O, which is useful for checking that you haven’t accidentally painted over eyes or hairlines. After painting, every single parameter in the preset is still editable in the panel on the right. You’re not committed to anything.

Where I’d Push This Further (Or Pull Back)

The technique as demonstrated works beautifully for portraits where you have a clean, controllable surface to paint over. Where I’ve run into friction is on images with complex textures or busy backgrounds where the brush mask bleeds into areas you don’t want affected. In those cases, I’ll combine the RAW brush approach with ACR’s Select Subject or Select Sky masking options, letting the AI do the heavy lifting on the initial selection and then using a brush mask to refine the correction inside that region. It takes a few extra clicks but keeps the whole thing non-destructive.

One other thing worth flagging: RAW brushes only work on RAW files or smart objects opened through Camera Raw. If you’re working with a JPEG and you try to replicate this, you’re not going to get the same level of tonal flexibility. The latitude just isn’t there. This workflow is a genuine argument for shooting RAW if you’re doing any kind of portrait or product retouching where the client will want revisions.

The Repeatable Workflow Is the Real Win

The single biggest payoff here isn’t any one brush or any one correction. It’s that you can build a library of your own RAW brush presets tuned to your specific style, and then apply them consistently across a whole shoot in minutes. That’s the kind of thing that turns a two-hour retouching session into a thirty-minute one.

Watch the full Kelvin Designs tutorial on YouTube for the visual walkthrough, especially the sections where he demonstrates painting the mask in real time. Seeing the brush build up on screen makes the Feather and Flow settings click in a way that’s hard to get from text alone.