I spent an embarrassing amount of time last month dodging and burning a portrait the old-fashioned way. Multiple layers, luminosity masks, careful blending. The kind of workflow that feels virtuous while you’re doing it and exhausting when you’re done. A client needed a turnaround in two hours and I was sitting in my usual corner booth, third coffee in, wondering if I’d overcommitted again.

What I should have been doing was working in Adobe Camera Raw with RAW brushes. That realization hit me after watching this Kelvin Designs tutorial on exactly that topic, and I genuinely felt a little annoyed at myself for not digging into this sooner.

Why RAW Brushes Are Different From Regular Photoshop Brushes

Regular Photoshop brushes paint pixels. RAW brushes, by contrast, paint adjustments. You’re working inside Adobe Camera Raw, applying localized edits with a brush, and every single stroke is non-destructive and fully adjustable after the fact. No flattening, no commitment, no “wait which layer was that on” panic.

The other big thing: because you’re editing at the RAW stage, before Photoshop even processes the image into pixels, the quality ceiling is higher. You’re manipulating the raw sensor data rather than pushing already-rendered tones around. For portraits and landscape work especially, that difference shows up.

Installing RAW Brushes in Adobe Camera Raw

Kelvin walks through the installation first, and it’s worth paying attention here because the file destination is specific and easy to miss.

The brushes come as .xmp files. Once you’ve downloaded the preset pack from Kelvin Designs, you need to navigate to the correct folder on your system. On a Mac, that’s:

Library > Application Support > Adobe > CameraRaw > Settings

On Windows, you’re looking at:

C:\Users\[YourName]\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\CameraRaw\Settings

Drop the .xmp files directly into that Settings folder. No need to import through Photoshop itself. Once the files are in there, open or reopen Adobe Camera Raw and the brushes will appear in your local adjustments panel. If you already had Camera Raw open, you’ll need to close and relaunch for them to populate.

That’s the install done. Genuinely five minutes, maybe less if you’re not hunting through hidden Library folders on a Mac (quick tip: hold Option and click the “Go” menu in Finder to make the Library folder visible).

Using the Brushes on an Actual Image

From inside Photoshop, open your image in Camera Raw. You can do this by going to Filter > Camera Raw Filter if you’re working on an existing file, or by opening a RAW file directly, which will launch Camera Raw automatically.

Once you’re in, select the Masking tool (it looks like a circle with a dotted edge, or you can hit Shift+W). Choose “Brush” from the masking options. This is where your RAW brushes live. Click the preset icon in the panel, and you’ll see the brush presets you just installed sitting there ready to go.

Each preset is essentially a saved configuration of Camera Raw adjustments, things like exposure, highlights, shadows, texture, clarity, and sharpening, bundled together and applied wherever you paint. A skin smoothing brush might drop texture and clarity while lifting shadows slightly. A dodge brush might push exposure and highlights in a controlled way. You’re not guessing at numbers. The preset sets them, and you paint.

Kelvin demonstrates painting the brush across specific areas of a portrait: brightening under the eyes, smoothing skin on the forehead, adding definition to hair. The technique is the same each time. Select the preset, adjust brush size and feathering with the sliders at the top of the panel, then paint. If the effect is too strong, dial back the Flow or Opacity slider. If you want to erase part of the mask, hold Option (Alt on Windows) and paint back over it.

Every mask you create shows up as a separate entry in the Masks panel on the right. You can click any of them to go back and tweak the underlying adjustment values, or you can shift-click to select multiple masks and modify them together. It’s a clean, organized system once you understand that each brush stroke generates an editable mask rather than a permanent change.

Where I’d Push This Further (and Where It Gets Awkward)

For portraits, this workflow is close to ideal. But I’ve run into friction when working on composites where the subject has already been extracted and placed on a new background. Camera Raw Filter applies to the whole layer, so if your subject is on a transparent layer, you might see unexpected behavior at the edges of your mask.

My workaround: merge the subject down onto a solid neutral background layer first, do the Camera Raw retouching, then re-extract if needed. Not elegant, but it works. Alternatively, if you’re smart about your layer order from the start and apply the Camera Raw Filter before doing any compositing, you sidestep the problem entirely.

The other limitation worth naming: this is a raster workflow once you’re past the RAW stage. If you’re opening a JPEG or a TIFF rather than a true RAW file, you’re not getting all the same latitude in the adjustments. The brushes still work and still look good, but you’ll hit clipping faster if you push the sliders hard.

The One Thing to Take Away From This

If you’re still doing all your local retouching on pixel layers in Photoshop proper, Camera Raw brushes will cut your time significantly while giving you more flexibility to revise. The non-destructive nature of the masks alone is worth the workflow shift.

Watch the full Kelvin Designs tutorial on YouTube to see the brush strokes in action, because seeing the mask overlay and the before/after on a real portrait makes the whole system click in a way that reading about it can’t quite replicate.