Photoshop’s latest update brings some of Camera Raw’s most-used controls into the app

6 hours ago 12

The Light Adjustment Layer lets you easily adjust brightness, shadows, highlights and more without having to understand curves.

Adobe

Adobe has announced a new collection of features for Photoshop, including one that it promises will let you do the type of processing you’d previously have to go to Adobe Camera Raw to do, without leaving the app’s standard workspace.

The feature is called the “Light Adjustment Layer,” which gives you control over brightness, contrast, and whites, highlight, shadow and black levels. Like other adjustment layers, it’s relatively flexible. You can use masks to have it only apply to certain parts of your image, and it’s non-destructive; unlike filters, you can easily tweak or remove it after you’ve added it.

As with many of the recent features we’ve seen from Adobe, this isn’t necessarily going to unlock new ways of working for Photoshop pros; most of what the layer does could be achieved with Curves and/or Levels adjustment layers. But it makes things that bit easier and friendlier to beginners.

The other major feature in the release takes that even further, introducing a whole new mode to Photoshop that strips away most of the interface. It’s called the ‘AI Assisted Editor’, and it bundles the tools you’d need to do some common and basic tasks into a simpler UI. The company says it’s designed for people who are new to the software and want to use it to make edits, but who might be overwhelmed by trying to figure out which tool to use, and by a layer-based workflow.

As the name implies, many of its features revolve around AI. There’s the maximal version, where you just type a prompt into a box with the edits you want made, which Photoshop will try to carry out using a generative model of your choice, but there are also modes that use some of the other AI tools the company’s built into the app. For example, one pane will let you remove the background, and another will let you remove unwanted objects in your image. Yet another gives you access to the Generative Expand feature, which attempts to fill in the area beyond the edges of your image.

Adobe has also introduced other AI tools, such as the ability to have generative edits using its FireFly models only apply to a masked portion of the image, a “markup” mode that lets you guide generative AI edits with drawings and an option in the task bar that lets you type a prompt that will edit the entire image.

Finally, the company has expanded the dynamic text tool, letting you create text that will adapt to a custom shape or path; previously, it only worked with circular, arched or bowed shapes. It’s also added a panel dedicated to Adobe Stock, letting you access the company’s library of stock images and graphics from right within Photoshop.

The AI Assisted Editor feature is launching in beta, while the other features will be available via an update to the app, coming for free to Creative Cloud subscribers (though, as always, many of the AI features will use some number of credits, which you’ll only have a limited number of per month, depending on your plan).

About the Author: Mitchell started taking pictures at 10 and hasn’t stopped since. It’s been a wide-ranging adventure, spanning a wide variety of genres and locales, and occasionally dipping into fascinations with video and filmmaking. They honed their technical knowledge doing documentation, programing and QA, writing for The Verge, and just generally messing around on the computer to see what breaks.

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