I was working on a portrait retouch last month, bouncing between Photoshop and Lightroom like some kind of indecisive ping-pong ball, trying to get localized adjustments to feel natural without flattening the whole image. Luminosity masks, adjustment layers, the works. It was taking forever and still looking a little… cooked.

Then I stumbled onto this tutorial by Kelvin Designs on RAW brushes inside Adobe Camera Raw, and it was one of those moments where you realize you’ve been doing something the long way around for years. Not a great feeling, but a useful one.

What a RAW Brush Actually Does (And Why It’s Not Just a Regular Brush)

Before getting into the how, it’s worth being clear on the what, because “RAW brush” sounds like marketing language until you understand the mechanic.

When you apply a RAW brush inside Adobe Camera Raw, you’re painting localized, parametric adjustments directly onto your image. You’re not adding pixels. You’re not burning or dodging in the traditional destructive sense. You’re essentially telling Camera Raw: apply these specific tonal and color parameters only in the areas I paint. And because it’s ACR, you can go back and change those parameters any time without touching the underlying file. It’s non-destructive in a way that actually means something.

This matters especially if you’re working with raw files or smart objects, because the adjustment lives in the metadata layer, not baked into the image data. Which, if you’ve ever merged a layer you shouldn’t have (ask me how I know), is a very comforting thing.

Installing Kelvin’s RAW Brushes: Faster Than You’d Think

In this Kelvin Designs tutorial, the first thing covered is getting the brushes into ACR, and it’s refreshingly straightforward. You download the brush preset file from his site at kelvindesigns.com/photoshop-raw-brushes, and the file you’re looking for is an XMP format, which is what ACR uses for its presets.

To install, you navigate to the Camera Raw presets folder on your system. On a Mac that’s typically buried in your Library folder under Application Support > Adobe > CameraRaw > LocalCorrections. On Windows it’s a similar path through AppData. Drop the XMP file in there, restart Photoshop, and your brushes show up inside ACR’s masking and brush tools. No plugin manager, no subscription tier unlocking, no drama.

One thing worth noting: you need to be in Adobe Camera Raw to access these. You can open a raw file directly and it’ll land in ACR automatically, but if you’re working with a JPEG or PSD, open the file as a smart object first, then go to Filter > Camera Raw Filter. That keeps everything editable and makes sure you’re actually working in the ACR environment where these brushes live.

Painting Adjustments: The Actual Workflow

Once you’re inside ACR with the brushes loaded, the workflow Kelvin walks through is clean and logical. You grab the Masking tool (the circle icon in the right-side toolbar), choose Brush, and then in the brush options panel you’ll see a Presets section where your newly installed RAW brushes appear.

Each brush preset is essentially a saved combination of ACR parameters, things like exposure, contrast, highlights, shadows, texture, clarity, and dehaze, tuned for specific tasks. Kelvin has brushes set up for things like skin softening, eye brightening, and dodging and burning, where the math is already done for you. You pick the brush, adjust the size and feathering using the on-screen controls (or bracket keys if, like me, you have feelings about keyboard shortcuts), and paint.

The real magic is what happens after you paint. You can click back into that mask and adjust the underlying parameters. If the skin softening is too heavy, dial back the texture slider. If the dodge feels flat, push the exposure a touch. You’re not redoing the work, you’re tuning it. That’s the non-destructive payoff in practice.

For portraits specifically, Kelvin’s demonstration shows how you can rough in a broad adjustment with a soft, low-flow brush, then refine edges with the Erase option in the same tool. The Erase function inside the ACR brush is subtler than just hitting delete on a mask layer because it respects the feathering of the original stroke.

Where I’d Push This Further (And One Place It Gets Awkward)

For most portrait and landscape work, this workflow is genuinely excellent. But I’ll flag one scenario where it gets a little clunky: complex composites with multiple elements that need different RAW treatments.

When I’m working on a composite that has, say, a subject shot in one lighting condition dropped into a background from a completely different shoot, each element might need its own Camera Raw Filter applied as a smart filter on its own layer. That’s fine, but managing multiple ACR instances with their own brush masks gets complicated fast, and the masks don’t talk to each other. You can’t easily link or group them the way you can with regular Photoshop layer masks.

For that kind of work, I still lean on Photoshop’s native dodge and burn layers with luminosity blend modes, or Lightroom’s masking tools if I’m staying in a raw-only pipeline. The RAW brush approach is strongest when you’re working on a single-source image or a flattened smart object where one ACR instance controls everything.

The Part That Sticks With Me

The reason I keep coming back to this technique is the speed-to-quality ratio. Getting localized tonal adjustments that look natural used to take me a stack of adjustment layers, careful masking, and a lot of back-and-forth. The RAW brush workflow compresses that into a single editable pass.

If you’re still handling localized corrections purely in Photoshop’s layer stack, this is worth learning. Head over and watch Kelvin’s full tutorial for the visual walkthrough, especially the brush installation and the live painting section, because seeing the feathering and flow controls in action is a lot clearer than reading about them.