Chapter 4

How to Use Camera Raw’s Adjustment Brush

There’s More Than Just One

I thought about calling this chapter “Advanced Camera Raw,” but thought that would make it sound like this stuff is hard, and it’s not—it’s just probably what you’d want to do next after learning the Basic panel in Camera Raw. Now, the title is slightly misleading because this chapter is about more than just the Adjustment Brush. It’s about a number of important brushes and features that are kind of like brushes, but are not really brushes, like the Graduated Filter, for example. If it was actually a brush, they would have named it the Graduated Brush, which unfortunately would have been misleading, because while you drag it to use it, it’s not a brush. You don’t paint with it, however, you can use a brush to erase areas that you don’t want affected, so it has a brush component with it. But, most folks don’t even know that brush exists because Adobe kinda snuck it into Camera Raw one night during a late-night update when everybody was watching The Walking Dead (I think it was the show before the season finale) and nobody was really paying that much attention. Since I brought it up (spoiler alert), were you surprised when Glenn pulled out that laptop (which somehow hadn’t lost its battery charge during the entire apocalypse, mind you), and he launched Photoshop CC, went straight to Camera Raw, and tried to fix the white balance in those pics he took of Daryl? I kept yelling at the screen, “You need a lot more magenta in his skintone!” But, he didn’t even touch the White Balance eyedropper the entire episode. I had to stop watching the show altogether after that episode, and don’t even get me started about the lack of cyan on Fear the Walking Dead!