Greg Benz Photography

NEW in ACR v18.6: Glow

Adobe Camera RAW (ACR) v18.6 just added an awesome new adjustment: glow. If you’re a fan of the “Orton effect”, you’re going to love it. It actually offers three different kinds of glow:

• Diffusion: This creates more blurring of detail around midtones for a dreamy glow. This mode is probably most similar to a typical Orton effect.
• Bloom: This creates a great highlight glow and is my favorite. It feels closest to dramatic but natural hazy light.
• Halation: This has even less diffusion, but a strong warm cast. It works great to enhance or warm up sunset skies, but should be avoided with cool color temperature scenes such as fog (as you can’t avoid the warm color cast).

The effect is available both globally and in local masks, and can be applied in RAW or on any layer as a filter.

Glow offers several controls:

• The model dropdown for the options described above.
• Glow: the overall amount.
• Range: this is a bit like adding a luminosity range mask (it determines which tones are targeted). Wlide left towards 0 to keep the effect isolated to the brightest highlights, or slide right towards 100 to include a wide tonal range.
• Spread: this determines how far outside the target area is affected. Slide left for less glow (less spillover to adjacent darker pixels) or right for more glow (lighten shadows around highlights).
• Warmth: this controls the color cast.
  • Diffusion and Bloom have a default value of 0 (no color cast) and you can slide negative/left for cooler tones or positive/right for warm tones.
  • Halation works differently, with warmth added at all values (somewhat confusingly this slider has the same range as the others even though it has no color-neutral position).

Tips for getting the best results with Glow:

• Set amount initially to 100 so you can see the effect. Click the disclosure triangle to expose the other options (it is almost always helpful to tweak these secondary values).
• Select the style (model dropdown) first, as this has the greatest impact and changes how the sliders below it impact the image (especially warmth).
• Adjust the remaining sliders in order (range, then spread, then warmth). Hold <alt/option> while adjusting them to more clearly visualize how they work and how to set them (range clearly targets highlights, spread clearly blurs, and warmth will show the color cast being applied).
• I find the results are much better when applied to the RAW image (rather than using as a filter).
• Local masks:
  • Unlike many other controls, glow in a local mask looks the same as when applied globally – which is great because this offers the best quality when you have a RAW source.
  • Local glow can set a negative amount, which lets you reduce or eliminate glow you created globally (as the local results are the same as global, so you’re just changing the amount).
  • The model and sliders (everything but amount) is the same for global and local controls. When you change one, you always change the other. So you cannot locally alter the model, warmth, etc directly (though you can use different glow options with different layers that you blend with masks in Photoshop).
• Note on some bugs:
  • avoid the diffusion model for HDR images at this time. There is a bug and it will not push tones into the HDR range, which creates a strong artifact in many images.
  • If you have a smart filter and use bloom / halation in a local mask, it will reset to diffusion when you open the filter (I don’t see this when re-editing local mask for RAW smart objects, only the filter and only with the local mask).

This feature is only in ACR at this time, but hopefully we’ll see it in all versions of Lightroom as we typically do shortly after.

ACR v18.6 also includes a new “trim” command in the crop tab. At first glance, this might just look like crop. The purpose of this tool is to tell LRC to ignore the trimmed content when using generative AI features. For example, you might trim out a distraction at the edge and then use generative expand to replace it.

NEW in ACR v18.5: blemish removal

Adobe Camera RAW (ACR) v18.5 just added a great new feature: blemish removal. This can easily save you hours of work with portraits, weddings, high school seniors, etc. It uses AI to intelligently find skin blemishes like pimples or patchy skin – while keeping important features like moles, facial hair, tattoos, etc. With just a click or two, you can easily avoid a lot of cloning work.

The workflow is very simple:

• Go to the remove tab, open blemishes, and click “apply”
• Amount controls how aggressively it goes after problems and you’ll probably leave it at the default 100 much of the time.
• Fade controls how much it goes goes after less obvious issues. Sliding less will help preserve details like moles. Sliding right will help more aggressively remove problems that persist even with amount at 100.
• Click Refine for more local control:
  • Restore prevents it from altering areas you brush
  • Remove lets you target or try harder in areas which weren’t fixed with the global options

As with any AI tool, the goal is to save time. Don’t expect it does 100% of the work every time. In my experience, it will do 80+% of the work for you – and you can use your manual clone / heal brushes in ACR or PS to fix anything it doesn’t fix automatically.

The ACR v18.5 also includes other improvements including options to flatten AI edits or render to DNG (this is not RAW) to help support some generative edit workflows, as well as support for new cameras and lenses.

As is typical, ACR tends to get new features before Lightroom, but this is a very welcome addition and I hope to see blemish removal expanded to all the Adobe RAW processing software in the future.

Lightroom v15.4: Better select subject, duplicate detection, and HDR

Adobe just released Lightroom v15.4 with several updates:

1. Much better “select subject” masks.
2. Duplicate detection to help automatically find and remove clutter from your catalog
3. 16-bit HDR exports to give you more control in Photoshop
4. Assisted culling updates to filter out images based where your subject’s eyes are closed or out of focus
5. More options to sort/find images based on use of AI masks
6. Keyword syncing across the cloud and mobile versions of Lightroom
7. More responsive brushing, camera updates, and more

The video tutorials below go into depth on these first three updates (broken into two parts to record relevant video in HDR when comparing how 16 vs 32-bit exports affect Photoshop editing).

Part 1: Select subject and Duplicate Detection:

The new mask quality improvements are automatic when you use select subject going forward. For an existing image, you may replace your existing mask as shown – or just change the AI denoise setting to create a prompt to update masks and click to refresh them.

The workflow for duplicates:

• Click the icon for Duplicates in the Library (or menu: View / Duplicates).
  • There is unfortunately no shortcut key for this module, which is a bit cumbersome to get back here if you try to view any images large (which automatically takes you out of the Duplicates view).
• Expand each stack to review, and right-click your favorite image to “set as original” (which is the top of the stack).
• Right-click and show in Finder if you need to check the full path.
  • It would be ideal if LRC were updated to show the full path in the future.
  • You may right-click a thumbnail in the normal grid and use View Options to enable “top label” to show “folder” to at least see the parent folder in the Duplicates view.
• When you are comfortable to commit to removing images, select all target stacks, right-click and choose “remove duplicates”.
  • Note that images with virtual copies are not marked and it would be ideal if LRC were updated to help make this more clear.

Part 2: 16 vs 32-bit HDR workflows:

Opening as 16-bit HDR in PS is ideal when the only edits you wish to make are with tools which are missing in 32-bit Photoshop. You may later switch to 32-bit if needed via Image / Mode / 32-bits per channel. Going in the opposite direction isn’t a simple task in Photoshop, but Lumenzia / Web Sharp Pro support it (via the flyout menu in WSP or by clicking the selective color icon in Lumenzia and you may delete that extra adjustment layer).

Note that 16-bit HDR files are nearly as large as 32-bit when you open as RAW Smart Objects. That is the ideal workflow since it is non-destructive, but 16-bit HDR files will save you quite a bit of space over 32 if you open as rasterized layers.

For more details on the other v15.4 updates, see the detailed post from Victoria Bromptom (“Lightroom Queen”)