Adobe Camera Raw

The Painterly Landscape Edit: How to Stop Fighting Your RAW Files and Start Sculpting Light
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The Painterly Landscape Edit: How to Stop Fighting Your RAW Files and Start Sculpting Light

I spent three evenings one fall chasing a waterfall shot in Olympic National Park. I had the composition. I had the light. What I did not have was an edit that matched what I remembered feeling when I was standing there. Every time I opened the file, I’d reach for the contrast slider, drag it too far, pull it back, overcorrect with shadows, and end up with something that looked processed rather than felt.

Stop Reaching for the Contrast Slider: Editing Mistakes That Are Flattening Your Landscape Photos
Video Tutorials

Stop Reaching for the Contrast Slider: Editing Mistakes That Are Flattening Your Landscape Photos

Every Sunday morning I take a photo walk around Seattle. No agenda, no client brief, just me and whatever light shows up. And for the first year of doing that, I’d come home with these gorgeous raw files that somehow looked flat and overworked by the time I was done editing them. I couldn’t figure out what I was doing wrong. I knew my way around Lightroom well enough, but something in my process was quietly killing the images.

How Color Grading Transforms Flat Landscape Photos Into Atmospheric Images
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How Color Grading Transforms Flat Landscape Photos Into Atmospheric Images

For years, my go-to move when processing a golden hour shot was to drag the temperature slider to the right and call it warm. The problem? Warming up a whole image also warms up your shadows, and suddenly you lose that beautiful contrast between the glowing light and the cool, moody dark areas that made you hit the shutter in the first place. Everything just looks… orange. Flat in a different way than it started.

How to Use Adobe Camera Raw as a Full Editing Suite Inside Photoshop
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How to Use Adobe Camera Raw as a Full Editing Suite Inside Photoshop

If you’ve ever felt like Lightroom and Photoshop exist in two separate universes that you have to keep shuttling between, this workflow is going to feel like a relief. For years I edited portraits in Lightroom, exported a TIFF, dragged it into Photoshop for any compositing or retouching work, then realized I needed to tweak the exposure again and had to start the whole round-trip over. It was tedious, and honestly it made me avoid certain edits just because the back-and-forth wasn’t worth it.

Adobe Camera Raw Just Got a Major Upgrade — Here's What Changed in the October 2024 Update
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Adobe Camera Raw Just Got a Major Upgrade — Here's What Changed in the October 2024 Update

If you’ve been using Lightroom Classic and Camera Raw interchangeably, assuming they’re always in sync, October 2024 is the month that assumption finally breaks down. Adobe pushed a significant update to Camera Raw that did not land in Lightroom Classic or Lightroom Desktop at the same time, which means if you’re doing your raw editing in Photoshop’s Camera Raw plugin, you have access to tools your Lightroom-only friends don’t have yet.