Camera Raw 18.5 landed on the 4th August, and alongside the usual long list of small tweaks there are three additions worth knowing about. Two of them are quick admin jobs. The third is a brand new portrait tool that genuinely changes how retouching works inside Camera Raw.
One thing to get out of the way first. All three are Camera Raw only at the moment. They aren't in Lightroom Desktop or Lightroom Classic yet. Camera Raw is the processing engine sitting underneath the whole Lightroom family, so new features tend to turn up there first and then work their way across to everything else. If you've got Photoshop, you can start using all of this today through the Camera Raw Filter, on raw files, JPEGs, TIFFs, or an individual layer.
Turning the generative AI features off
If you enter competitions, or you deliver to clients who want to know nothing generative has been near their files, or you'd simply rather not have those tools sitting there in front of you, you can now switch them off completely.
Open Preferences, the settings icon, go to the Generative AI tab and uncheck Enable Generative AI Features. That's it.
What it turns off is the three tools that make brand new pixels out of thin air. What it leaves alone is Denoise, Super Resolution and the standard Remove tool, because none of those are generative.
One thing to watch. The setting is per machine, so if you work on a desktop and a laptop you'll need to turn it off on both.
Two small additions to the vectorscope
If you use the vectorscope for colour work, and you'll find it by right clicking the histogram and choosing Show Vectorscope, there are two new options in there.
You can now line Red up at 3 o'clock, which matches the layout video editors have been using for years. And you can toggle on LAB values so you're reading actual numbers rather than eyeballing it, which is handy when you're matching skin tones across a whole shoot rather than one frame.
Small stuff, but if you're already living in the vectorscope you'll appreciate both.
The new Blemish Removal
This is the headline addition, and it lives inside the Remove panel under a new section called Distraction Removal, then Blemishes.
Click Apply and it runs an automatic first pass across the face. That one click gets you a decent way there, but only a decent way. The bit that actually matters is understanding what the two sliders underneath are doing, because they're doing two very different jobs.
Amount, for the temporary stuff
The Amount slider deals with temporary marks. Spots, breakouts, the things that would have cleared up on their own in a fortnight anyway.
At 100 it removes every temporary mark it can find. As you bring it down, the smaller and subtler marks come back first while the more prominent ones stay hidden. Sitting somewhere in the middle is usually where you want to be, because it clears the angry breakout without stripping the skin of its normal texture and leaving you with that plastic look nobody wants.
Fade, and the default I'd change every time
The Fade slider handles permanent features. Moles, beauty spots, freckles. The things that are part of someone's face rather than something that turned up last Tuesday.
Adobe has set the default for Fade at 50.
I've got a real problem with that. At 50, Camera Raw is fading a client's natural moles and beauty spots halfway out before you've touched a single control. Nobody asked it to. You open the file, and a piece of software has quietly made a decision about somebody's face on your behalf.
So the habit I'd get into is this. Every time you open a portrait, drag Fade down to 0 before you do anything else. Look at the face as it actually is, then decide. If the client has asked you to soften a mole, fine, soften it. But make that an intentional choice you've made, not a default you didn't notice.
Refine, for the bits it gets wrong
Clicking Refine gives you a brush with two modes.
Restore brings back something the tool has taken out that you wanted to keep, a character mark or a scar it's decided to tidy away. Remove clears anything the automatic pass has missed.
Between those two you can get any face exactly where you want it in under a minute.
If you're working on a group shot you can pick individual faces, or select All People and do the lot in one go. I'd be careful with All People, though. The same Amount and Fade settings applied to a teenager and a grandparent rarely work for both, and you'll usually be better off going face by face.
Texture is only half the job
Here's the bit that gets missed, and it's the difference between a retouch that looks finished and one that doesn't quite.
There are two separate problems on a spot. There's texture, which is the raised physical bump on the skin, and there's tone, which is the red patch sitting underneath and around it.
The Blemishes tool is excellent on texture. It does nothing at all about tone.
Think of it like makeup. The Blemishes tool is the concealer, covering the bump. You still need a base to even out the colour underneath. Skip that step and you're left with red blotches on otherwise clean skin, and those often pull the eye harder than the original breakout did, because now there's nothing else there to explain them.
Fixing the tone with Point Color
The temptation is to build a skin selection and shift the colour globally, but that moves the whole face just to fix a few patches. A localised brush is much better behaved.
grab a standard masking brush with a soft, feathered edge and paint over only the red, blotchy areas
inside the brush mask settings, open Point Color
take the eyedropper and click on an area of clean, healthy skin nearby, which tells Camera Raw what colour that red patch is supposed to be
widen the Variance slider
That last one is where it happens. Expanding Variance pulls the surrounding red tones smoothly towards your clean sample, so the patchwork evens out without anything else on the face moving.
So, next time you open a portrait
Run Blemishes, pull Fade to 0 and decide for yourself what stays, then set Amount somewhere sensible rather than pinning it at 100.
Then brush the red areas and use Point Color to bring the tone back in line.
The whole thing takes a couple of minutes inside one dialogue box. No healing layers, no frequency separation, no round trip into Photoshop and back. For anyone who's put off retouching because it always felt like a job that needed a stack of layers and half an hour, this is a lovely way in.