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.
