Before we get to the tutorial below, I want to share that there is a new Photoshop Virtual Summit (aimed at beginners). I’m not teaching at this event, but had an incredible time at last year’s LR Summit and highly recommend it. The all-star list of PS instructors includes Blake Rudis, Aaron Nace, Dave Cross, Matt K, Glyn Dewis Colin Smith, and several other top educators.

(affiliate link)

Camera Raw Smart Objects are one of the most important pillars of non-destructive editing in Photoshop. You can make a change to anything in your layered image all the way back to the original RAW edit. Yet they have two pain points: they can slow down your workflow and you can’t see how your layer will blend into the image while making edits. The new adjustment layers in Photoshop beta (v27.4) help address those shortcomings by putting some of the most popular raw adjustments directly into native Photoshop.

Photoshop Raw adjustment layers now include:

• “color and vibrance” – this includes temp, tint, saturation, and vibrance
• “clarity and dehaze“
• “grain”

These adjustments work exactly like making global adjustments to your image via Filter / Camera Raw Filter. This layer-based approach offers several benefits:

• better local adjustments:
  • vibrance is not available as a local raw adjustment.
  • global versions of temp, tint, and saturation are better than the local raw adjustments (as shown in “not all RAW edits are the same“).
• higher quality masking: 
  • PS offers much more precise control for advanced masking techniques like luminosity masks.
  • PS masks can use feather / density / opacity for easy refinement.
• much faster editing workflow than going in and out of ACR
• preview the layered image while making adjustments.
  • If your filtered layer is below other layers, the final result in Photoshop will often look very different from the view you see inside ACR.
• significantly smaller files:
  • When using the raw filter, you often need to select one or more layers and “convert to smart object” to work non-destructively or create a new mask.
  • For a 46 megapixel camera like the Nikon D850 or Z7rii, each use of “convert to smart object” increases the size of a compressed PSB by about 1/2 GB!
• blend modes are simple to apply (vs being cumbersome or unusable for many photographers when working with the raw filter).

Note that grain adjustments always have a random seed. If you apply a raw filter to two copies of the same image with the same settings, the grain will be randomized (but aesthetically very similar). Same goes for the grain adjustment layers when you make a new one (but not if you duplicate one, it’ll keep the same seed). So if you try to compare these directly, you’ll see they are technically different. It does not matter and this is no different from how grain has always worked for the raw filter, it’s a little random to ensure each image is unique (just like grain in film).

Of course, these are just some of the raw adjustments and don’t work with your raw data (which offers the best results where possible). These new layers work best in combination with Raw Smart Objects (get the speed where you can with the layers, and use the raw filter otherwise). Here are several tutorials to help you get the most out of RAW smart objects and the camera raw filter:

• My full course on non-destructive editing: Smart Objects: from Start to Finish
• 3 kinds of smart objects
• 3 common misconceptions about Camera RAW smart objects
• Don’t let this hidden setting ruin your raw smart objects

Where might this go next? It would be great to see PS add adjustment layers for:

• texture – this would naturally below with the new clarity and dehaze adjustment.
• whites / highlights / shadows / blacks
  • you can do this now by adding luminosity masks on a curve, levels, or brightness / contrast layer
  • but it would be even simpler if you could create one of those adjustments and then add a luminosity mask as needed to refine it further (the masks will always be more powerful, but a more targeted adjustment makes for a better starting point).
• curves
  • It does not make sense to change the existing curves layer or add another type of curve (that would be confusing and unnecessary).
  • However, it would be great to see the “refine saturation” slider make its way into to the PS curves. You can use “normal” or “luminosity” blend mode now, but that’s rather crude and a slider would offer much better results to get just the right color adjustment.