Adobe recently introduced a new Adjustment Brush in Photoshop 2025, designed to simplify precise editing tasks. Knowing how to efficiently make targeted adjustments can significantly streamline your editing process.
Coming to you from Anthony Morganti, this informative video explores how the Adjustment Brush can simplify edits such as selectively brightening a person's face or enhancing specific elements within a photo. Morganti demonstrates clearly how traditional adjustment layers required multiple steps—creating masks, inverting them, and carefully painting in adjustments—to achieve targeted effects. While effective, this process took time and precision. Now, with the Adjustment Brush, you can directly apply adjustments like brightness, contrast, or vibrance by simply painting over the area you want to affect, saving you considerable time.
Morganti further illustrates the tool’s potential by using it to add vibrance selectively to a bird without affecting its background, highlighting the tool’s built-in AI-based Object Selection feature. This capability identifies objects within your photo automatically, allowing precise masking with minimal effort. If the automatic selection isn’t perfect, you can refine the mask manually using the brush's add or subtract feature, giving you accurate control without cumbersome manual masking. This precision is invaluable, especially when editing busy images or scenes with complex elements, ensuring adjustments appear natural and intentional.
Additionally, Morganti demonstrates a practical scenario involving a building with multiple colorful doors. Using the Adjustment Brush paired with object selection, he isolates the doors with just a simple marquee selection, effortlessly adjusting their brightness and hue independently from the rest of the image. This flexibility opens up creative possibilities, allowing for subtle corrections or more pronounced stylistic changes quickly and intuitively. Another scenario involves refining selections where the initial automatic selection includes unwanted areas. Morganti easily adjusts this by removing unwanted portions of the mask with a quick brush stroke, ensuring that only the dock in his example is affected by his edits.
The Adjustment Brush isn't about providing entirely new functions but rather streamlining and refining how you approach familiar tasks in Photoshop. It reduces repetitive manual steps, minimizes the potential for mistakes, and speeds up your workflow significantly. Whether you’re editing portraits, wildlife photos, architecture, or landscapes, this tool can simplify tasks that previously required intricate selections and painstaking masking. Check out the video above for the full rundown from Morganti.
