Three Camera Raw Features You Might Have Missed

Camera Raw quietly gained a set of tools that fix a problem you have probably fought with for years: masks that stop short of the leaves, the hair, or the edge where you actually need them. Two new sliders now let you push a mask outward or pull it back, and they work on the specific mask types you reach for most.

Anthony Morganti walks through these changes, starting with the feather and edge sliders that show up when you build a sky mask. Feather softens the transition between where the mask applies and where it doesn't, so you can blur that boundary or leave it crisp. Edge either contracts the mask, choking it inward, or expands it, spreading the adjustment past the original selection. Morganti zooms into a stand of trees against the sky and drops exposure hard to show what each slider does at the edges. You get haloing when you feather too aggressively, and a different kind of halo when you choke the mask, so the demonstration shows both the trap and the fix.

These two sliders appear on sky, subject, background, landscape, and people masks, and nowhere else. Morganti also points out that they haven't reached any version of Lightroom yet, so this is a Camera Raw advantage for now. The color grading section is where things get interesting. Color grading used to be a global tool, applied to the whole image through the color wheels in the edit panel. Now it lives inside masking, which means you can grade one region and leave the rest untouched. Morganti masks the background of a portrait, drops its saturation to black and white, then pushes yellow into the midtones and highlights and blue into the shadows. The model stays clean while the background carries the color.

The eye example is the one that sells the whole idea. Morganti takes a black-and-white portrait, masks the iris and pupil with the people mask, and grades the shadows and midtones toward blue until the eyes turn blue in an otherwise monochrome image. It looks deliberately silly, and that is the point. Selective color inside a mask wasn't possible before, and this shows how far you can push a targeted grade once color grading and masking live in the same place.

The white balance change is smaller but worth knowing on its own terms. The temperature slider used to bottom out at 2,000 Kelvin on raw files. Now it reaches down to 1,500 Kelvin, giving you more room to cool an image that was already too warm at the old limit. Non-raw files got a matching extension. Their temperature scale ran from minus 100 to plus 100, and the cool end now stretches to minus 150 while the warm end stays at plus 100. You gain range on the blue side of the slider, which helps when a JPEG or TIFF ran out of correction before you were done.

Local color grading fits into a wider shift that Adobe has been pushing across its raw editors for a few years now. The company keeps moving global adjustments into the masking panel, first with tone and color controls, and now with the color wheels themselves. The practical takeaway: you can build a look in layers, treating a mask like a targeted grading pass rather than a simple brightness fix. Colorists working in video have done this for a long time, splitting shadows, midtones, and highlights across separate regions of a frame. Bringing that thinking into stills means you can warm a subject and cool a background in the same file without ever leaving Camera Raw, and without the round trips to Photoshop that used to be the only way. If you shoot portraits, the eye and background examples map directly onto real work, and the same logic applies to product shots or any scene where foreground and background want to feel like different color worlds.

Watch the full walkthrough above to see Morganti demonstrate each slider in real time and catch the details that only make sense in motion.