What Adobe Just Added to Camera Raw and Lightroom

Camera Raw now has a grid view with ratings, color labels, and a full filter bar, so you can cull and sort a folder of raw files without going near a Lightroom catalog. If you've stayed away from Lightroom because of imports and catalogs, the distance between the two apps just got shorter.

Matt Kloskowski selects 580 raw files in Bridge and opens every one of them into Camera Raw to show how the new grid holds up under a real load. The thumbnails render quickly. A slider scales them up or down depending on how closely you need to inspect each frame, and right-clicking a photo brings up star ratings, color labels, and rejects, each with its own keyboard shortcut. Sorting options sit alongside, though the filter bar does the heavy lifting: you can narrow hundreds of images by rating, label, date, file type, camera, or lens. Kloskowski points out that opening 580 photos isn't much use if you have to scroll through all of them to find the picks you made two weeks ago, and the filters solve that. Your ratings and labels stay with the files, so a year from now, reopening that folder brings back every bit of sorting you did.

Bridge is a free download from Adobe, and Camera Raw comes with Photoshop, which means plenty of people already own a catalog-free workflow without realizing it. For proprietary raw files, Camera Raw and Bridge can write ratings, labels, and edits to small XMP sidecar files saved right next to the originals. That lets you copy a folder to another drive or another computer and keep everything intact, with no database to rebuild or relink. The approach has a long history outside Adobe. Photo Mechanic built its reputation on fast, folder-based culling, Capture One offers Sessions for people who'd rather not manage a catalog, and DxO PhotoLab browses folders directly. If you shoot a job, pick your keepers, finish a few frames, and move on, the folder model tends to fit better than a catalog designed to hold your entire archive. A catalog still earns its keep when you need to search across years of work at once.

Exposure matching arrives in Camera Raw too. Lightroom Classic has had a version of this for a while: select several photos, and the first one you click becomes the target that the others are matched to. The settings-based option compares shutter speed, aperture, and ISO, which sounds sensible until a scene's light changes. Kloskowski's example shows the problem: he matches darker frames shot down an alley to a bright street frame taken at a much faster shutter speed, and the settings-based option pushes them far too dark. A second option matches by camera settings and light. According to Adobe, cameras record an ambient light reading that almost no software uses, and Camera Raw now reads it, so those same alley frames brighten up to sit closer to the target. Kloskowski sees time-lapse work as the most likely use. The histogram and vectorscope also change: you can now tear them off the panel, resize them, and park them on a second monitor.

The Lightroom side is lighter. In both Lightroom and Lightroom Classic, Adobe says the reflection removal option in the Remove panel works better now, and it's aimed at reflections in windows rather than in eyeglasses. Lightroom desktop alone gets Prompt to Edit, which offers sample prompts such as colorizing a black and white photo, adding dense fog, or fixing dust and scratches, along with a field for writing your own. A recent section and output settings sit below the prompt box. You'll also see how many generative credits a request will use before you run it, though you get no preview of the result and can't take the credits back if you don't like what comes out. Kloskowski also lays out the kind of AI editing he expected Adobe to build into Lightroom instead: a text request that selects the sky or the tree edges, sets up adjustments to white balance and color grading, and hands you a stack of editable settings to fine-tune yourself.

Watch the video above to see the new grid view and both exposure-matching options in action.