I’ve got a great tutorial on the latest Adobe updates below – but first, want to share a time-sensitive announcement. I’m teaching TWO new classes focused on creative HDR editing this week at the Lightroom Virtual Summit. The Summit includes >30 hours of instruction from 17 top instructors. You can view the sessions for free for 48 hours after each airs this week, or better yet, get the VIP pass for lifetime access to course recordings, detailed class notes, bonus videos, presets, cheat sheets, and more. If you buy through my affiliate links on this page, you’ll also get access to a bonus “ask me anything about HDR photography” session as well – live this Saturday with a recording included.

Adobe just created new AI mask refinement controls in Adobe Camera RAW (ACR) v18.3. This includes AI masks for sky, subject, landscape (vegetation, architecture, mountains, etc), background, and person.

Each of these masks now includes two new sliders:

• Feather: a simple gaussian blur softening hard mask edges that aren’t critical.
• Edge: lets you expand or contract the mask to better align with important edges, such as trees or buildings.

Sometimes just moving the edge slider a tiny bit can completely eliminate halos! You shouldn’t expect these tools to do all the work for you. The best results come from using them in combination with other masking techniques, so be sure to watch the full tutorial to get the most out of these great new controls.

As is often the case, ACR gets the newest capabilities before Lightroom. You’ll need ACR v18.3 for now. If you work primarily in Lightroom, you can edit there and open the image as a RAW smart object, then quickly tweak the mask via ACR.

To learn more about getting the most out of RAW, be sure to see my new Advanced RAW Masks course.