20 Photoshop and Camera Raw Updates You Probably Missed

Photoshop's autofocus point checker inside Camera Raw 18.6 shows you exactly which points your camera locked onto, so you can catch a blurred watch face or a hand in focus before you commit to the wrong shot. That single feature answers a question you've probably asked yourself a hundred times while culling: did the camera focus where I thought it did?

Unmesh Dinda runs through 20 recent additions to Photoshop and Camera Raw, and the autofocus overlay is just the opener. Right-click a raw file, select show autofocus points, and the exact focus points appear on the image. Zoom in and the story gets clear fast. Dinda demonstrates it on a watch, where one frame nails the face and another lands on his hand instead. The shortcut is Command Option Shift O on Mac, Control Alt Shift O on Windows, and it turns the overlay on and off instantly.

Several of the strongest updates sit in Camera Raw itself. The new glow effect lives in the effects dropdown and gives you three distinct styles: diffusion, which softens highlights; bloom, which adds light on top of highlights; and halation, which wraps a colored edge around bright areas. Dinda runs it as a smart filter so it stays editable, and he shows how the highlight slider controls whether only the brightest points glow or whether softer highlights get pulled in too. There's also a vectorscope now, borrowed from video color grading, which maps where your colors land and doubles as a skin tone checker when you turn on the skin tone indicator. Match your skin tones to that diagonal line using point color, and uneven complexions fall into place.

The Camera Raw generative expand deserves attention because it works on raw files while keeping every setting intact. Enable expand in the crop section, drag out the canvas, click generate, and the extended area carries your white balance, highlights, and shadows with no visible seam. Dinda points out that this is impossible in Photoshop proper, where expansion happens on a baked-in version of the image. The blemish removal tool in the remove section keeps real skin texture instead of smoothing everything into plastic, with separate sliders for spots and for moles or birthmarks. If you'd rather avoid AI entirely, you can switch off every generative feature under the settings cog.

The through-line worth grabbing here is that Adobe keeps moving raw-native editing forward while adding a parallel AI workspace that hides layers and channels completely. Photoshop 27.1 introduced the AI-assisted mode, with markup tools, region selection, and a tune beta that shifts a scene from day to evening. That split reflects a wider shift across the industry, where destructive one-click results and precise nondestructive control now live under one roof. The practical takeaway is to treat the two as different jobs. Reach for the AI workspace when you want a fast rendered concept, then hit pro editor to drop the full image back into Photoshop for real masking, dodging, and compositing. Understanding masks, focus, and light is what lets you decide which tool actually earns the edit, rather than accepting whatever the model hands back.

A few quieter changes save time in daily work. You can now customize the save dialog file format under Edit, dragging formats like IFF and PCX out of the list so save a copy stops burying the options you use. The metadata info panel reads camera model, settings, and content credentials, and clicking the location opens the exact spot in Google Maps. Dynamic fit resizes text to fill any shape you draw, including a path made with the pen tool, adjusting the font size as you type. Color wheels have moved into masking too, so you can grade a background in one direction and your subject in another. Two new mask sliders, feather and edge, let you contract or expand a selection and soften it, which pairs well with shallow depth-of-field shots where a hard mask edge gives you away.

Give the video above a full watch to see the remaining features Dinda demonstrates, including render to DNG and the halation glow trick stacked on top of a bloom.