Camera Raw

Two Ways to Kill Red Eye in Photoshop (And When to Use Each One)
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Two Ways to Kill Red Eye in Photoshop (And When to Use Each One)

Portrait retouching has a way of humbling you. You can spend an hour perfecting skin tones, dodging and burning like a fine art printer, and then someone points out the glowing demon eyes in the background that you somehow stopped noticing. Red eye is one of those problems that feels embarrassing to have and equally embarrassing to fix badly. A heavy-handed correction leaves you with flat black blobs where pupils should be, and that looks almost worse than the original.

Stop Dragging the Contrast Slider Like Everyone Else — Do This Instead
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Stop Dragging the Contrast Slider Like Everyone Else — Do This Instead

There’s a specific kind of frustration that comes from knowing a photo almost works. The composition is there, the light is interesting, but the whole thing looks flat — like someone draped a thin grey sheet over it. For years, my fix was to grab the Contrast slider in Camera Raw, drag it right, and call it a day. The result was always a little crunchy, a little over-cooked, and honestly kind of lazy.

Camera Raw Just Got a Secret Photo Browser (And It Might Change How You Work)
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Camera Raw Just Got a Secret Photo Browser (And It Might Change How You Work)

I have a complicated relationship with Lightroom. Not a hostile one, just. complicated. I’ve tried to commit to it more times than I’ve tried to commit to going to the gym, and the results have been roughly the same. The catalog system, the import dance, the general feeling that I need to ask permission to edit my own photos. It’s not for me. So when I saw that Adobe’s October 2026 update quietly gave Camera Raw a feature set that starts to look a lot like a standalone photo management app, I paid attention fast.

Camera Raw's New Lens Blur Tool: What It Does, What It Can't, and When to Actually Use It
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Camera Raw's New Lens Blur Tool: What It Does, What It Can't, and When to Actually Use It

Client work has a way of teaching you lessons you didn’t ask for. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve delivered a portrait edit only to have someone come back asking why the background “doesn’t look blurry enough” or “looks fake.” Background blur is one of those things that sounds simple until you’re actually trying to pull it off cleanly in post. So when Adobe dropped a Camera Raw update during Adobe Max week in October 2023, and one of the headlining features was a new Lens Blur tool built right into Camera Raw, I paid attention.

Stop Settling for Flat Photos: Peter McKinnon's Fast Photoshop Edit Workflow, Broken Down
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Stop Settling for Flat Photos: Peter McKinnon's Fast Photoshop Edit Workflow, Broken Down

There’s a specific kind of disappointment that hits when you open a photo on your computer and it looks absolutely nothing like what you saw with your own eyes. You were there. The light was incredible. You felt it. And now your screen is showing you something flat, dull, and vaguely depressing. I’ve been editing photos and graphics professionally long enough to know this feeling doesn’t go away – but the gap between “what the camera captured” and “what you actually saw” gets a lot smaller once you have a reliable editing process you can move through quickly.

Stop Ignoring Your Lens Distortion: A Flat-to-Fabulous Photoshop Rescue Walkthrough
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Stop Ignoring Your Lens Distortion: A Flat-to-Fabulous Photoshop Rescue Walkthrough

I have a folder on my hard drive called “salvage.” It’s full of photos I liked enough to keep but never liked enough to actually edit. Bad perspective, warped buildings, that particular kind of flat, sad look a photo gets when the camera did its best and still kind of failed. For a long time I just accepted that some shots were unfixable without a ton of manual fussing. Then I started paying closer attention to how working photographers actually move through Camera Raw, and a lot of those “salvage” files started looking a lot more promising.

Stop Trusting Your Eyes: How to Nail Skin Tones with the Camera Raw Vectorscope
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Stop Trusting Your Eyes: How to Nail Skin Tones with the Camera Raw Vectorscope

Here’s something nobody tells you when you’re starting out: your monitor is lying to you. Not maliciously, just… constantly. The warm glow of a coffee shop window, a slightly uncalibrated display, a room with yellow overhead lighting, all of it conspires to make you think a photo looks great when it’s actually a little green, or magenta, or just off in a way that a client will immediately notice and you won’t be able to explain.

Adobe's New Blemish Removal Tool Is Shockingly Good (And Free to Use)
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Adobe's New Blemish Removal Tool Is Shockingly Good (And Free to Use)

Skin retouching used to be one of those tasks that separated the people who really know Photoshop from everyone else. Frequency separation, healing brushes, clone stamp patches layered on top of each other like geological strata. It works, but it’s slow, and if a client comes back three weeks later wanting changes, good luck unpicking all of that. I’ve been burned enough times that I’ve become borderline fanatical about non-destructive workflows.

Lightroom vs Photoshop's Light Layer: Where You Should Actually Be Editing Your Photos
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Lightroom vs Photoshop's Light Layer: Where You Should Actually Be Editing Your Photos

A few months back I watched a friend spend twenty minutes in Photoshop stacking curves layers, luminosity masks, and a lighting adjustment layer to fix the exposure on a landscape shot. It looked great. It also could have taken three minutes in Lightroom. I didn’t say anything because I’ve made the same mistake plenty of times, including recently, when I caught myself reaching for Photoshop out of pure habit when the RAW editor was sitting right there, already open, already better equipped for the job.

Stop Wondering Why Your Raw Photos Look Worse Than Your Camera Screen
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Stop Wondering Why Your Raw Photos Look Worse Than Your Camera Screen

There’s a specific kind of frustration that hits when you’re out shooting, you glance at the back of your camera, and the photo looks genuinely great. Rich colors, solid contrast, punchy details. Then you get home, open it in Photoshop Elements, and it looks like a completely different photo. Flat. Dull. Kind of sad. If you shoot in raw mode and you’ve felt this, you’re not imagining things and you’re not doing anything wrong.

Photoshop's New Auto Dust Removal Is the Tiny Feature I Didn't Know I Needed
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Photoshop's New Auto Dust Removal Is the Tiny Feature I Didn't Know I Needed

There’s a specific kind of dread that hits when you’ve finished editing a landscape shot, exported it at full resolution, and then noticed a cluster of sensor dust spots scattered across what was supposed to be a clean blue sky. I’ve been there more times than I want to admit. You zoom in, you grab the Spot Healing Brush, and you start playing whack-a-mole with tiny gray blobs for the next 20 minutes.

Photoshop's New Landscape Masking Is the Camera Raw Feature I Didn't Know I Needed
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Photoshop's New Landscape Masking Is the Camera Raw Feature I Didn't Know I Needed

I’ll be honest with you. My relationship with Camera Raw masking has always been “good enough.” Select sky, paint in the foreground with a gradient, argue with a brush tool for fifteen minutes over some tree branches, call it done. It works. It’s not elegant, but it gets the job done between my third and fourth coffee of the morning. Then I watched this Matt Kloskowski tutorial on the April 2025 Photoshop update and realized I’d been doing the equivalent of cutting a steak with a butter knife.