Photoshop 2027's 21 New Features Tested, and What They Cost in Credits

Photoshop 2027 and the Camera Raw update that came with it add a long list of features, with more already waiting in the Photoshop beta, and many of them draw on Adobe's generative credits, so plenty of clicks now carry a cost on top of your subscription. Knowing which tools hold up at full resolution and which ones soften your files decides whether an update speeds up your editing or adds cleanup work.

The most impressive result in this release involves no generated pixels at all. Unmesh Dinda of PiXimperfect works through 21 additions to Photoshop and Camera Raw, and the one he ranks highest is Denoise for JPEGs. Until now, Camera Raw's AI noise reduction only worked on raw files. Convert a JPEG to a smart object, open the Camera Raw Filter, and the Denoise option now sits under Details, and on a very noisy portrait, the hair comes out clean and detailed. Dinda would give it his award for the best feature of the release, partly because it doesn't generate anything. Old phone shots, client files delivered as JPEGs, and archives from cameras you no longer own suddenly have a lot more life in them.

Relight Layer gets the most attention in the release, and Dinda treats it with equal parts admiration and caution. You can turn off the original lighting entirely, then place new lights and set their distance, hardness, intensity, and color temperature, including a custom-colored rim light behind the subject. Faces stay put: eyes, lips, and clothing remain in the same place, which some generative models struggle with. The preview is low resolution, though, and every click on Done costs 30 credits. With three lights stacked, fine hair detail turned to mush and halos appeared around the subject, and a glass perfume bottle got treated as a solid object with no refracted glow on the far side. In its current state, he doesn't think that would hold up for professional work, so check any result closely at 100 percent.

The Remove tool's new Remove Related Elements option shows the same split between clever and costly. Circle a car, and Photoshop also takes out the light its headlights throw on the road. The whole image drops in resolution in the process, and the Enhance option only upscales that lower-resolution generation, so you get new invented detail rather than your original pixels back. Remove Related Elements costs 10 credits, and Enhance adds 10 more, or 20 on files over 25 megapixels. The fix Dinda shows is simple: crop down to the area around the object, run the removal, then use Image > Reveal All to restore the full canvas and mask the edges. Everything outside that crop keeps its native detail. The same pattern appears with Firefly Upscaler 2, which now reaches 67.1 megapixels and costs 10 credits for results up to 25 megapixels and 20 beyond that. A 1,200 x 800 image enlarged 4x gained resolution but garbled the stripes on a tie and the holes in a set of buttons, while a 4,000 x 4,000 file taken to 8,000 x 8,000 came back with visible fabric fibers.

That pattern holds for nearly every generative tool in Photoshop, and you can apply it on your own. A model invents more when it has less to work from, so the smaller the area you hand it and the more real detail in that area, the closer the output stays to your photo. Cropping before a removal, upscaling files that already carry detail, and masking generated fills back to the problem area all follow from the same idea. Credits push in the same direction. Adobe tied generative features to monthly credit allotments starting in 2023, and since 2025 it has let you pick third-party models such as Google's Gemini and Black Forest Labs' FLUX inside some generative tools, with costs that vary by model and output size. A practical habit is to sort features into two groups before you use them: tools that analyze the pixels you already have, like Denoise, and tools that create new pixels. The first group you can run freely and judge by eye. The second deserves a 100 percent check and a quick look at the credit cost before you commit.

The release also brings a redesigned interface that Adobe calls its biggest change in a decade. Tool groups expand when you hover instead of hiding behind small triangles, Curves lets you click straight to the red, green, or blue channel without a dropdown, and the color picker shows your recent colors. If the hover behavior bothers you, both changes can be turned off under Settings > Interface. You can also replace the default Lorem Ipsum placeholder text under Settings > Type, and it works with other languages. Quick Compare shows a before-and-after split with one click, and its "before" is the file as you opened it in the current session, so after you save and reopen, it only tracks the changes you make from that point. Large PSD and PSB files save faster, too, and the Remove tool's on-device generative mode, which runs without credits or an internet connection after a 4 GB model download, now also supports Windows on Arm machines with Nvidia RTX Spark GPUs.

Generative Recompose, under Edit, reframes a photo to a new aspect ratio and moves things around to make it fit, for 10 to 30 credits depending on output size. From a distance, Dinda's result looked right, but zoomed in, a person in the frame had become someone else, and the pattern on a pair of shoes had changed entirely. For that job, he still prefers Generative Expand, which fills only the added areas and leaves the original pixels alone. In Camera Raw, you can now copy AI removals from one photo to others through Copy and Paste Edit Settings, though you may need to drag a removal back into place if the framing shifted between shots. Color Grading can apply up to three LUTs at once, globally or inside a mask, including LUTs you load yourself. Glow now opens on Bloom and adds Motion, which sweeps the highlights in one direction, and Streak, which runs both ways. Blemish removal has renamed sliders, one for blemishes and one for natural marks such as moles, and it kept skin texture so well under extreme settings that Dinda says nobody does it better right now. Generative Restyle is the weak spot. Turning a day scene into night with a partner model such as Nano Banana worked impressively, but its option to pick an in-between frame builds a video from the before and after, costs 80 credits, and loses most of the image quality.

The Photoshop 28.1 beta is more mixed. Asked for frequency separation layers, the new AI Assistant took ages, headed in the right direction, and then didn't actually do anything, and Adobe's own sample prompt for a more dramatic sky produced a result Dinda couldn't use. Convert to Mockup bends a design around the folds of a tote bag convincingly and lets you adjust the environment lighting, but on a bottle, the graphic broke apart at the edges, and a smart object with a cylinder warp did the job better. New Camera Angles Layer generates wide, low, overhead, and close-up versions of a shot while keeping faces consistent, at a reported 20 to 90 credits. Convert to Text Layers, at about 10 credits, rebuilt the type in a flat JPEG as editable text with closely matched fonts, and it's his second favorite feature. The built-in timelapse records only the canvas, but he still finds a regular screen recording more practical. The standout is the Remove tool's new Find Distractions option for ambient effects. For 10 credits, it cleared smoke, fog, and haze from a scene while leaving the buildings behind them intact, and a separate shadows option lifted harsh shadows across a portrait without altering the face.

His three favorites by the end are JPEG denoising, Convert to Text Layers, and ambient effect removal, and the video's before-and-after zooms make it easy to see where each of the other 18 holds up and where they fall apart.