Adobe Camera Raw in Photoshop Is Doing Heavy Lifting I Used to Do Manually (And I Feel Foolish)
I spent the better part of three years doing things the hard way in Photoshop. Manually painting masks for background blur. Dragging Hue/Saturation sliders trying to isolate a sky without torching the rest of the image. Stacking adjustment layers like I was building a skyscraper out of toothpicks. It worked, mostly, but it was slow and fragile. One wrong move and the whole thing collapsed. That’s actually how I learned about smart objects, after accidentally flattening a client’s project file and spending the next two hours trying to reconstruct it from a JPEG export.