I’ll be honest. For an embarrassingly long stretch of my freelance career, I treated Adobe Camera Raw like a toll booth. Something you click through as fast as possible on the way to the real work in Photoshop. Open image, nudge the exposure, hit Open, and get on with life.

Then a client sent me a portrait that needed targeted skin retouching and localized color adjustments, and I spent two hours doing fiddly masking work in Photoshop that I should have handled in sixty seconds before I even got there. A friend pointed me toward RAW brushes, I found this tutorial, and I felt that specific kind of irritation that comes from learning you’ve been doing something the hard way for years.

In this Kelvin Designs tutorial, Kelvin walks through exactly how RAW brushes work inside Adobe Camera Raw, covering both the install process and a practical editing walkthrough. It’s tight, clear, and immediately useful. Watch the full thing here:

What RAW Brushes Actually Are (And Why They’re Not Just Regular Brushes)

RAW brushes live inside Adobe Camera Raw, not inside Photoshop’s main workspace. That distinction matters more than it sounds. When you paint with a RAW brush, you’re applying non-destructive, parametric adjustments to specific areas of your image. You’re not pushing pixels. You’re telling Camera Raw “apply these settings here.” That means you can go back later, change the brush settings, wipe the whole adjustment, and the original data is still sitting there untouched.

Compare that to dodge and burn in Photoshop, which, if you’re working on a flattened layer and your name is Dave Barker who once deleted an entire client project, you might not be able to undo quite so gracefully. RAW brushes give you a safety net that’s baked into the format itself.

Installing RAW Brushes: Slower Than You’d Hope, Simpler Than You’d Fear

Kelvin starts with installation, which is worth covering because it trips people up. You’re not installing these like Photoshop brushes through the Brushes panel. RAW brush presets are XMP files, and they live in a completely different folder on your system.

On a Mac, you’re navigating to Library / Application Support / Adobe / CameraRaw / LocalCorrections. On Windows, the path runs through AppData / Roaming / Adobe / CameraRaw / LocalCorrections. If the LocalCorrections folder doesn’t exist yet, you create it. Drop your XMP preset files in there, restart Photoshop (or Camera Raw if it’s already open), and your brushes will appear in the preset dropdown inside the Adjustment Brush tool.

Kelvin’s own RAW brush pack, available at kelvindesigns.com, installs cleanly using this method. It took me maybe four minutes the first time, half of which was finding the hidden Library folder on my Mac because Apple apparently wants that to stay mysterious.

Painting Adjustments That Actually Stay Where You Put Them

Once you’re inside Camera Raw and have your image open, you access the brush tools from the toolbar along the top of the interface. The Masking tool (it looks like a circle with a dotted border) is where RAW brushes live. Select Brush from the dropdown, and now you’re working with a brush that carries whatever parametric settings you’ve assigned to it.

Kelvin’s workflow here is smart: pick a preset from your installed brushes, check what adjustments are loaded (exposure, shadows, clarity, color temperature, whatever the preset specifies), and then just paint over the area you want to affect. The red overlay shows you exactly where you’re painting, which you toggle on and off with the O key. Adjust the brush size with the bracket keys, set your Feather high enough that the edges blend (somewhere around 70-80 works well for skin), and keep Flow moderate rather than maxed out so you can build the effect gradually.

The part that takes a minute to internalize: you’re not applying one brush per image. You can add multiple separate brush adjustments, each with different settings, each affecting different parts of the photo. One brush for brightening the eyes, another for warming the shadows in the background, another for pulling clarity out of the skin. Each one is its own independent adjustment you can modify or delete without touching the others.

Where I’d Push Back Slightly

RAW brushes are genuinely excellent, but they do have a ceiling. The brush selection tools inside Camera Raw are not as precise as what you can build in Photoshop proper. If you need to isolate a subject from a busy background with real accuracy, you’ll hit the limits of what Camera Raw’s brush can do. The Select Subject and edge refinement tools in Photoshop are still stronger for complex masking.

My actual workflow now is a hybrid: I handle broad localized adjustments, skin work, and light/shadow corrections in Camera Raw using RAW brushes before I open the file. Then I bring it into Photoshop for anything that needs surgical precision. Using both in sequence is faster than trying to do everything in one place. Kelvin’s tutorial gets you the Camera Raw half of that equation. The Photoshop half is a different rabbit hole.

The Part Worth Remembering

The biggest shift RAW brushes created in my work is not a technical one. It’s a mindset shift: do more before you destructively edit, and you’ll spend less time fixing mistakes later.

Watch the full Kelvin Designs tutorial for the visual walkthrough, especially the painting demonstration, which is much easier to follow on video than in words. You can also grab his RAW brush preset pack at kelvindesigns.com if you want to skip building your own presets from scratch.