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Camera Raw 18.6 adds a dedicated glow slider that folds several manual editing techniques into one control. If dreamy, soft light is part of your style, this changes how you build that look from scratch.
The walkthrough comes from Christian Möhrle, who opens by pointing you to the effects panel in the Camera Raw editor, where the glow slider now sits at the bottom. Push it up and you get a subtle wash of glow, but the real control hides behind a small arrow next to the slider. Click it and the panel expands into style, range, spread, and warmth options. Möhrle runs through three glow styles: diffusion, which intensifies colors and softens bright areas; bloom, which spills glow over darker edges with less saturation; and halation, which targets the brightest light source in the frame. He makes no secret of his preference, calling bloom his favorite for its dreamy quality.
The reason this tool matters becomes clear once Möhrle explains what it replaces. His usual method for this soft, glowing look involved masking, negative dehaze, and raised blacks stacked together. The new spread slider does much of that in one move, pushing glow outward around bright light sources with a natural, soft result. He warns you to go easy on the range slider, keeping it low to avoid an overcooked effect, while treating spread as the control you can actually lean on. Warmth handles the color of the glow, cool at one end and warm at the other, standing in for what he previously built with the temperature slider and negative dehaze.
Halation gets its own spotlight because it behaves differently from the other two. On a moon image, it does almost nothing, but Möhrle switches to a shot with artificial light and shows it wrapping a bright glow around those sources. He points out this look comes largely from videography, where blooming highlights around practical lights are common. Under halation, the warmth slider loses its cold end entirely, leaving you a range of warm, yellow, and orange tones. That restriction fits the effect's purpose, since halation in film and cinema tends to read warm by nature.
The move to fold these techniques into a single slider follows a wider pattern in Adobe's recent updates, where multi-step manual workflows get compressed into purpose-built tools. Adaptive presets, AI masking, and the point color tools all took jobs that once required careful layering and turned them into a control or two. The practical takeaway holds even if you never touch the glow slider: the effects you admire in other people's work are usually stacks of small adjustments, and learning the underlying recipe pays off no matter which tool you use to apply it. Möhrle demonstrates this directly by using the glow slider inside a radial mask, placing it over the brightest spot in a landscape and warming it up, which is the masked version of the blacks-and-dehaze trick he used to rely on. Once you understand that glow comes from spilling brightness and shifting color around light sources, you can reach for whichever method suits the image, whether that's the new slider or a manual mask.
The second half of the video is a full edit from a raw file you can download and follow along with. Möhrle merges an HDR bracket, sets the profile to Adobe Standard, and works through exposure, shadows, blacks, and highlights before cooling the white balance to around 5,800 K for balance between the warm sunset and the cold sky. He drops clarity and dehaze to soften the frame, then adds glow with the bloom style, keeping the spread up and the range down so the effect doesn't overwhelm the whole image. From there he layers radial, linear, object, and landscape masks to shape the foreground, buildings, and water, then finishes with color grading in the mixer, split toning, calibration, and sharpening. The masked glow section is where the tool earns its place, letting him target specific areas with warmth and spread rather than applying one flat effect across the frame.
Give the video above a look to see how the glow slider behaves across all three styles and how Möhrle blends it into a complete edit.
English (US) ·