Adobe Camera Raw 18.6 Is Here

credits: Adobe

Adobe Camera Raw 18.6 is here, and the headline addition this time is a new Glow tool that brings three analog-inspired effects directly into ACR, Diffusion, Bloom, and Halation. You will find it in the Effects panel alongside Grain and Vignette. Diffusion gives your photo a softer, hazier look similar to shooting through a Black Mist or Pro-Mist filter, while Bloom concentrates that softer glow more around highlights. Halation ,on the other hand, adds the warm red-orange halos around bright edges and light sources that you sometimes see with film. Glow also works with Camera Raw’s masking system, so you can control how strongly it appears on a subject, luminance range, or selected part of the photo. The Style, Range, Spread, and Warmth settings remain global, though. For now, Glow is exclusive to Camera Raw and is not available in Lightroom.

Another useful addition is the new Metadata Info Panel, which means you no longer have to leave the main editing workspace just to check basic information about a photo. Clicking the small “i” on the right side brings up details including the camera, lens, photo dimensions, file size, capture date, copyright information, filename, caption, and any embedded Content Credentials. Adobe has also added a new Trim tool inside the Crop & Expand panel. Unlike ACR’s normal non-destructive crop, which simply hides everything outside the crop area, Trim actually makes those outside pixels transparent. That should make things a little quicker when preparing photos for composites or working with transparent backgrounds.

Trim can also be combined with Generative Expand, so you can trim down to the area you want and then extend the canvas again using Firefly content. Camera Raw 18.6 also adds more camera and lens profiles, including support for the Tamron 12-20mm f/2.8 and Reeflex anamorphic and fisheye lenses for iPhone, although Adobe’s full camera-support list has not yet been updated at the time of the release. Adobe Camera Raw 18.6 is available now through the Creative Cloud desktop app.