Here are some of my favorite Photoshop Tips! How many did you know?

Thanks

Colin

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New Adaptive Profiles in ACR Adobe Camera Raw make photos better by using ai to analyze each photo, rather than apply a blanket profile to all photos. Because each photo is unique, this will get you way better results than if you don’t use it.

Ill add full written steps here soon!

The post Adaptive Profiles in Adobe Camera RAW – perfect starting place for photos appeared first on PhotoshopCAFE.

About a year ago, I showed a sneak from Adobe MAX of reflection removal from a photo. These sneaks are experimental features Adobe Engineers show off that may or may not make it into a product. Since then, many people have asked if this will make its way into Lightroom or Photoshop.

Reflection Removal is available today as a technology preview in Camera Raw. I’ll show you how to activate and use it in this tutorial. Currently it only works on RAW files. Adobe have said they are working on supporting other file formats as well as Lightroom support. That will all be coming soon. Ok, let’s look at reflection removal.

Enabling Reflection Removal in Camera RAW

First of all, update Photoshop to the newest version. This is in regular Photoshop, you don’t need the beta for this one.

Launch Camera RAW (by opening any image. Filter>Camera RAW).

Choose the gear in the top Right.

Click Technology Previews and turn on New ai Features and Settings Panel. (Technology Previews are beta for Camera Raw).

Restart Photoshop for this to take effect.

Using Reflection Removal

In Camera Raw, here is a photo of a train interior, shooting through the glass.

Click the Eraser icon

Turn on Reflections from the Distraction Removal panel.

Instantly, the reflections are gone and the contrast has been increased as if the glass wasn’t even there.

There are some things it works on better than others. It works best on Plate glass at the moment and struggles with smaller things like eyeglasses. Let’s continue to see how it works as well as other limitations.

Notice the reflection slider is at 100. This is completely the image without reflections.

If you slide the Reflection filter to the Left (-100), you will see just the reflections.

This uses ai to understand what is the reflection and what is the subject and separates the 2. This does not use Generative AI and it doesn’t generate anything that isn’t in the picture.

If you move the slider to 0, it will show the original image.

The reflection removal works well for glass and things like shooting through airplane and car windows, hotel windows, storefronts etc. It also works well for photos and framed pictures behind glass.

It doesn’t currently work well for images with specular highlights where the details are blown out, because the ai can’t currently understand an area where there is no pixel detail. It also doesn’t work will for brightly lit night scenes.

Here is a picture of a younger me on the nVidea Speak Visual campaign a few years ago. Lets run it on this image.

Notice it removes the reflections, but didn’t remove the specular highlights from the light source.

Take the same picture without specular highlights and run it again,

A much cleaner result.

I’ll keep you updated as this feature progresses. Subscribe to our newsletter to get updates.

Thanks

Colin

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A lot of people have been asking for this feature. Ever since Adobe added the ability to generate masks of people, faces and different parts of people to Lightroom and Camera RAW, Ive received a ton of communication from the community. “When will this feature be in Photoshop??” Well.. here it is!

Written steps coming soon

Hope you enjoy,

Drop a comment

Colin

The post Auto Select people and features in Photoshop appeared first on PhotoshopCAFE.

The new Generative Workspace makes it easy and quick to generate ai images in Photoshop via firefly.

You can batch process bulk images as well as use variables. Check it out in the video.

Full written steps coming soon!

Colin

The post How to use Generative Workspace in Photoshop appeared first on PhotoshopCAFE.

Sometime, you go to output an image and suddenly, the color changes. Or you are trying to combine 2 images and the colors change. What gives?
This tutorial shows you how to keep your colors matching perfectly and explain why they change, as well as how to prevent color shifts. The first part of this Photoshop tutorial, show you how to prevent color shift.

The 2nd part of this tutorial explains basic color management in Photoshop. Even if you are a beginner, these essential steps will help you work with consistent color throughout your workflow. This is not a tutorial on monitor calibration, It’s a tutorial on setting up Photoshop. This applies to any version of Photoshop.

Stop Photoshop changing colors on export

Start with a photo and you want to export a jpg. (This is a  photo, I made of talented musician, Taylor Davis.)

Choose File>Export>Save for web.

Usually it starts in the Optimized tab, showing a preview that may or may not match the original.

In this case, it’s close, but more saturated color than the original.

Here is the same image before I calibrated my monitor. The color is different but by more.

The more different this looks, the more you need to calibrate your monitor. Even a calibrated monitor, will be slightly different (with these settings) as you see in the first image.

‘

Here is another example of uncalibrated. When I change to the Original tab, it’s different again. You might be seeing these types of shifts. Which is the real color? (Tip: what you saw in Photoshop).

‘

If your colors are wildly off, or you have never calibrated your system, it will make a difference. This is not a tut on Calibration (I can do one, if I get requests). To calibrate, you will need a monitor that supports calibration. I use BenQ monitors. Disclosure, I am a BenQ ambassador, but the isn’t a sponsored tutorial and not a tutorial about monitor calibration. If about Photoshop color settings.

You will also need a device like the Calibrate Display Pro HL, If these is demand, I’ll do a tutorial on Monitor calibration.

How to view Accurate Color in Save from Web in Photoshop

Here is the first tip: Where it says preview in save for web, see if it says Monitor color

Change to Use Document profile. You should see a big difference. For many users, this alone will solve or greatly reduce the problem.

Notice how the colors now perfectly match (on a calibrated display).

The good news, even if the colors don’t match perfectly in Save for web, the output jpg or png image should still match the original.

Export as, an alternative way to export

Adobe wants us to use the newer Image>Export>Export as

You should notice the preview colors are closer to the original. The downside to Export as, is that lack of metadata and some other options, which leaves me still using the Save for web.

Hopefully, this helps you get better previews in save for web. Ok, now, lets set up Photoshop to give us perfect colors every time.

Basic Photoshop Color Management (Please read).

Within the RGB (Red, Green +Blue) world, there are different profiles (AKA color spaces).

• ProPhoto RGB supports the most colors (aka Largest Color Gamut), but not all colors can be displayed on your monitor.
• Adobe RGB is a reasonably large color space that can be displayed on monitors that boast 98%-100% Adobe RGB colors, this is common for printing to a desktop printer.
• sRGB is a smaller colorspace, but all the colors can be viewed on almost any monitor. Because of this, it’s the most common color space for sharing images online. Going to sRGB will cause you to lose some colors, so it’s best as an output file, not your working color.

There are other color spaces , such as P3 which is used by Apply on their devices and is also a good working color space for certain things. It’s a good idea to keep the original file in the largest color gamut possible, to preserve colors (in RAW, this doesn’t matter). Then work on your preferred profile for the image that you are going to output.

To view the color space in your image, choose Document profile from the bottom menu in Photoshop

Here this image is Adobe RGB. (16bpc means its a 16 bit file).

For my workflows, I use Adobe RGB and output to sRGB for sharing online and social media. (Some people use ProPhoto and their reasoning is it supports more colors and has a wider color gamut. For my needs right now, I prefer to be able to view all my colors on my monitor and use Adobe RGB and have a 99% Adobe RGB display on my Benq SW321C.

Please note, I shoot in RAW and store my images in Lightroom, so I don’t lose any color info on my originals. RAW files transcend any color space, because the RAW sensor data is preserved. If you don’t understand that statement, don’t worry, read on.

I set my settings to Adobe RGB in Lightroom and Photoshop, as well as on my camera.

Setting the  Default Color Profile

Choose Edit>Color Settings

This is where you choose the default colors Photoshop will use.

Working spaces>RGB this is where you choose the profile that you want to use. Whenever you create a new document, it will now be created into this space.

You can choose how Photoshop handles images that have a different profile, under Color Management Policies.

If the color profile is different than your working space (Adobe RGB in this case) :

Off: The color profile is removed from the image and it becomes untagged.

Preserve Embedded Profile: (my preferred choice) The image opens and the color space is unchanged. (You can manually change it with Image>Convert to Profile).

Convert To working RGB: Every image you open is automatically converted and tagged with the working space. For some people with a closed workflow, this might be a good choice. In my case, I working with different clients and across many different types of mediums, so I prefer to only change what I want to change and do that manually.

Converting Color Profiles

If you image profile is different, or to shows untagged (no color profile attached) then you need to convert it.

There is a wrong and right way to do this, If you choose Image>Assign Profile

You will notice Photoshop shifts the color as you change profiles.

Choose Image>Convert to Profile

Now you can change the profile without changing colors in your image.

If you follow the proceeding streps, you should have less issues with color mismatches.

Hopefully you found this helpful

Great to see you here at the CAFE

Colin

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As many people are aware, Photoshop used to support a pretty decent 3D feature set. These were beefed up in Photoshop CS6 Extended and continued through CC for a number of years. See tutorials on Photoshop 3D here. Adobe started to retire these features because of changes in Direct X and other technologies. This tutorial, shows how to keep legacy 3D working in Photoshop.

I think the most common way people used it, was to composite 3D objects into Photoshop. The advantage of 3D is the ability to change the angle and lighting to make everything match perfectly. Another thing I loved about the 3D was the ability to animate different properties.

3D is back, but in a different way. By Using the new Substance 3D viewer, you are able to position your objects, light and texture them in a much more powerful way than before. You can even generate 3D objects from text. What you don’t have is the ability to interact with the 3D objects, directly in Photoshop, nor the ability to animate the 3D. All that said, for compositing, the results are better than ever, lets take a look.

Getting Set up

At the time of this writing (it will change in the future), this feature is only supported in the Beta Version of Photoshop.

In the creative Cloud App, choose apps>beta and install Photoshop.

You will also need to install Substance 3D viewer beta. This will also install a plugin in Photoshop beta.

Free 3D library

While you are in Creative Cloud app, click on 3D & AR

You will see Substance 3D assets. Click to go to the page, it will open in your web browser.

Here you can download a number of different assets, including models, procedural textures and lighting models. I clicked on the sofa and choose download.

Open an image in Photoshop and Drag and drop the 3D model into Photoshop.

It will appear as a Smart Object layer.

Either double click the smart object, or choose Edit Contents

Substance 3D viewer will appear with your composition in the window.

You can easily position and scale the 3D object, by right, left or middle mouse button dragging. (More in the video at the top).

Position the object. Click to Photoshop and the image in Photoshop will update to match what you see here. This is where the nice integration takes place.

Choose the environment button on the left-bar. (lightbulb icon). Now you can adjust the Lighting to match the angle of the photograph.

Click on light presets to change the lighting environment, you can also load in your own HDR image and use that. This sets the light color and reflections.

Click the texture icon. This is where you change the textures and materials (a material is a texture preset). Here I increased the roughness to make the cushions look more like velvet. You can change many things about the textures.

You can choose a different diffuse color, here we made the cushions red.

If you want to use once of the material presets. click on Material presets and a panel will appear.

Drag the material onto the object. Here I used a velvet preset.

Notice a blue bar appears and says:

Replace all instances: Which will replace all the cushions, or whatever objects are grouped together, or

Apply to all Objects: Will apply the material to the entire 3D model.

Notice all the cushions receive the new preset.

All the properties can be changed including the color. We went for red again, as it matches this scene nicely.

If you choose the bottom-left icon this takes you to the generative window. Here I added the text prompt Victorian Ballroom. Substance uses the 3D object (this is the way I positioned it in 3D space) and generates a background based on the prompt. I made a tut on generative ai and 3D in Substance viewer here.

When you are happy with your 3D model, click the Ray tracing button to render it.

When happy, click To Photoshop in the top Right.

Go back to Photoshop and the image is updated to Match what’s in Substance viewer. To change it, go back to Substance viewer, or double click the smart object. It’s really easy and fun.

Hopefully you found this week’s free Photoshop tutorial useful!

Great to see you here at the CAFE.

Colin

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This tutorial is looking at Adobe’s newest app, Substance 3D viewer. This app can integrate with Photoshop (I’m working on that tutorial next). Substance viewer can be used to apply textures and enviroments to 3D model and position them for placement into photoshop. Substance viewer also has the ability to generate actual 3D models from text prompts. This actually came out of one the sneaks at Adobe Max in 2023. This is a Quick Look, watch the video for more in-depth feature walk through.

Substance viewer is currently in beta and available for free.

How to Gert Substance 3D viewer

go to the Creative Cloud ap.

Click on beta.

You will see Substance 3D viewer.

Download it to your Mac or PC.

Once you launch Substance 3D viewer, you’ll see a welcome screen.

Ill go over all the features in another tutorial, let’s look at the Generative ai capabilities in this tut.

Click in the top right thumbnail that says: Create 3D model with text prompts.

You’ll see 2 options on the left. Choose text to 3D

Type in rotary telephone and generate.

This is an actual 3D model that can be tumbled and scaled.

It may not look like an amazing 3D model, but it serves a very important purpose for Generative ai.

Up until now, you have been able to generate with text prompts and reference images. You can sort of get what you want, but you are limited by existing photos.

With 3D, you now have the ability of get exactly the angles you want, by positioning the 3D model. I really think, this will become a very important part of generative ai in the future.

We can now. choose 3D model to image. Add your desired prompts and let the 3D model guide the main object.

phone on wooden desk. This phone, looks very similar to the 3D model, but this is now a rendered image.

Change the prompt to say plastic phone.

You can adjust the sensitivity to determine how closely you want to match the 3D object.

You can also bring in your own 3D models.

Here is a model of a DC3 that I created in Blender and exported as an .obj.

If you want, you can also apply a texture to your model using the materials. I’ll do another tut on that.

Now, I can enter a text prompt and use the 3D model that I built by hand.

Airplane at airfield.

And an image is generated to match the 3D model. Yes, its still got a ways to go, because it wanted to turn this into a jetted its far from perfect, but I like the direction it’s heading.

There are different ways we can generate too. If we choose Generate a new Look for my Model, it will make a texture for the model

You cn see it here. It’s still trying to make a jet engine, but it’s impressive that it was able to texture this well. If you have ever made UV textures for 3D models, you know how hard it is.

Let’s use a more simple model provided by Adobe.

Lets use this toaster.

We can generate an isolated subject with texture. This can be useful for compositing. I’ll show you how to bring this back into Photoshop in the next tutorials in this series.

We can add a prompt and generate a realistic image of breakfast in the kitchen from this 3D model.

I hope you found this intro to Substance Viewer interesting and useful.

Let me know, if you want to see more tut on this. (Im planning on doing one on Substance Viewer and Photoshop integration.)

Thanks

Colin

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Its that time of the year for the big upgrades. Big, as in they get full version numbers. Generally many beta features are now promoted to full features and new ones added.

There are a lot of performance improvements in LRC this time around and if you have modern computer, you should notice them. Modern, because more stuff is pushed to GPU.

The first thing you will need to do, is upgrade your catalog when you first launch.

This brings us to the first new feature, which is an unseen one. Lightroom automatically creates a backup of your old catalog now.

Another “small” but big to some people (I’m one of them) the long-awaited ability to easily rename your catalog. I know, I know, why did that take so long?

Now, when you rename your catalog, all the supporting files will be renamed including the ability to rename the parent folder. No more Lightroom_199_main-v13-3_v6_really_the_new_updated_2023_update filenames!

You can see everything is now renamed. You can also delete your old catalogs as you can see the names clearly now. (Tip: Before deleting old catalogs, I suggest moving them to a different folder and make sure everything works on the new catalogs before emptying out the old ones).

Choose Photoshop version

This isn’t new, but I want to include it because I am asked this ALL the time.

If you go to settings, you can choose the version of Photoshop  (regular or Beta) to edit in from the External Editing tab. If this doesn’t work, launch the version of Photoshop you want to work in first. Then when you choose edit in Photoshop, it should go to the correct one.

Remove Tool updates

Same as in ACR the ai remove tool is updated.

You can circle select

It will detect the shape, you can keep painting to add other objects, or hold alt/Option and paint to remove from the selection.

Click on remove

And it does a great job. Use variations arrow to choose the best one.

You can also scribble select to tell Lightroom which object you want to select for removal.

It works quite well.

And a bit more clean up

done.

This works best in smaller areas on images that you will print, because the resolution isn’t large enough for areas bigger than 1024 px x 1024 px at a time. You can safely using it on multiple small areas to eventually encompass a larger area. If you are sharing them smaller for social media, it mostly doesn’t matter as much.

Tethered Capture updates for Nikon.

Nikon shooter rejoice! The same snazzy new tethering that was added for Sony is now here for Nikon. Expect drastically faster and more reliable performance when your Nikon camera is tethered.

Content Credentials

Content credentials allow you to add your information and links to your socials into your photographs. You can have the info on the Cloud, attached to your images or both. Now people can find and contact you if they like your images.

This is optional, and you can choose what info to include.

Noise Reduction. Denoise

The ai denoise for RAW photos is out of beta (early access)

Look at this noisy image.

Choose Denoise

You will see a preview

Without denoise

With

As you can see it does a terrific job.

Unlike in ACR, this is still using the earlier version of denoise, which creates a new file. Hopefully the new beta version of denoise in ACR makes it way over, but nevertheless it works really well.

HDR update Gain Map

Lightroom Classic has been getting HDR updates for a while now and I’ve made tutorials about them and told you about each update.

If you have an HDR enabled monitor, you can see HDR images have more detail in the highlights and look more vibrant and realistic. (you will notice this on the XDR phones and HDR TVs as well).

If you turn on SDR (Standard Dynamic Range) previews you can adjust the output for non HDR (High Dynamic Range) screens.

You may have wondered what happened to the 2 versions? Is it just a simulation? Now with Gain Maps, when you create an HDR image, both versions are included and the viewer will be shown the correct version depending on their display. You have to choose a compatible file format, such as Jpeg XL. You will enable HDR output. I should mention, a regular (SDR) photo won’t be magically converted to an HDR image. And, no (as I’ve been saying for YEARS) you cant process the same image differently and merge them together to get HDR images, you will just get a heavily tone mapped SDR image. I have written and made videos extensively about HDR if you need to get up to speed. 

Extended displays on additional monitors now support HDR as well, this is a good new feature for people using multiple HDR displays.

There you have it, those are the big new features in Lightroom Classic. Check out the video above to see them all in action,. as well as mention of a couple more smaller ones.

Thanks for checking it out

Colin

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Lets have a look at the new features in ACR 2025 aka ACR 17. Camera Raw comes with Photoshop and is accessablw either through Bridge or as a filter in Lightroom. There is a slight difference between the 2 and we will see what that is in a sec. Other thing, Lightroom Classic uses ACR as its processing engine. In this case, we have a couple of beta features in ACR that haven’t found their way into lightroom yet.

How to update Camera RAW

Let’s update to the latest version.

Launch the Creative Cloud app.

To update ACR, you update Photoshop. The latest version is part of the Photoshop installation.

When you update Photoshop, its a good idea to NOT remove old versions. I would make sure everything works first, and then uninstall the old version after a week or 2 when you are sure you don’t need it any more. Yes, you can have multiple versions installed at one.

You can Launch ACR as. filter in Photoshop. Filer>Camera Raw filter

But notice the crop tool and geometry are missing. So are the image sizing options at the bottom.
This is intentional, because as a filter, ACR can be run on a layer and you wouldn’t want to mess up your entire document, by resizing a layer.

If you want to run the “full” version of Camera Raw, either open a raw file from File open.. or you can launch a jpg, RAW, Tiff or png from Adobe Bridge. Right-Click  and choose Open in ACR.

Enabling the Beta Features

Some of the new features are turned off, lets enable them.

Launch the full ACR. Click on the gear in the top Right.

Go to Technology Previews>Turn on New features from Technology Previews

Denoise

The ai denoise may be the best feature in ACR.

Here is an image at 25,000 ISO and its very noisy (grainy).

In the detail tab there is a Denoise option.

It removes the noise really well. Whats new about this and  Raw Detail and Super Resolution, they are non destructive and a new file isn’t created any more. They work on the original file.

Its still limited support for file types, but more RAW formats are included now including Apple Pro Raw (iPhone) and google Pixel raw.

Adaptive Profiles

The new Adaptive profiles are great, especially for HDR images. This is an unedited, but merged HDR image.

Here you can see its using the default Adobe Color.

Change it to adaptive.

Immediately, the image looks better, this is before we have applied any adjustments yet.

Profiles arwe appl;ied before image adjustments, more about ACR / Lightroom Profiles here

Generative Expand

Normally, when you straighten a photo, it crops in to the photo and you lose some content around the edges.

If you turn on Enable Expand..

Now you can outcrop

Click on Generative Expand

All the transparent areas a filled with generated content. Now you can straighter or an image without losing and of the content.

Lets try it on a larger image. This is a stitched panorama.

As you can see, it can generate large areas with ai.  Be careful with this though, because the generated pixels are lower resolution, so this doesn’t match too well on a large image. You can see the grain mismatch around the edges. Hopefully this improves in the future.

Extending an image. We are adding more to the left and top of this image.

In this case, it looks pretty good. It helps when the extended area is smaller and less detailed.

Generative Remove

Gen Remove isn’t brand new in ACR, but it got some updates.

Turn the options on, like before

Now you can circle select

It will detect the object

And it nicely removes the back sign.

For the front one, we will use the other new feature, scribble select

It detects it nicely

And ai removes it.

You have 3 variations to choose from. You can see in the video.

Ok, thats our ACR updates this time around. There are also some new Adaptive Presets and a couple of other little things.

Hopefully you found this tutorial useful

Colin

PS Don’t forget to follow us on Social Media for more tips..

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The post Adobe Camera RAW 17 in Photoshop 2025 new Features appeared first on PhotoshopCAFE.