I'm Re-Editing All My Photos Because of This One Camera Raw Feature [What's New in ACR 18.6]

Adobe Camera Raw 18.6 was released today, and it brings three additions worth your attention: a new crop tool called Trim, a metadata panel, and a new effects tool called Glow. Glow is the one that's going to change how a lot of people finish their photos — I've already gone back and re-edited many of my own published shots because of it — so we'll spend most of this post there. But Trim and the metadata panel are worth a few minutes first.

Before anything else: open the Creative Cloud desktop app and confirm you're on the latest version of Camera Raw. None of this shows up until you update.

Trim: Crop Without Creating a New File

If you've used Render to DNG alongside Generative Expand, Trim will feel familiar — same idea, different execution. In the context of Generative Expand, Render to DNG let you crop a photo and generate a new file so you could use Gen Expand on it. That works great, but it means managing a second file alongside your original.

Trim takes a different approach. Say you've got a portrait shot on a seamless background with the photographer, stands, and clutter visible around the edges. You want a 16:9 crop with empty space for ad copy. Go to the Crop tool, crop loosely around your subject, then open the Generative Expand section — you'll find a collapsed "Trim" option inside it. Set your crop to the area you want to keep and hit Trim. Everything outside that crop is hidden, and Generative Expand automatically switches on.

From there, set your actual aspect ratio (16:9 in this case), position your subject where you want it in the frame, and click Generate. You'll get three variations to choose from, and picking one commits the edit. The key difference from Render to DNG: you're still working on your original file. Hit Command/Ctrl+R and the whole edit resets back to the untouched photo. No duplicate DNG sitting on your drive.

A Metadata Panel For You

Small addition, genuinely useful: there's now an info icon in the bottom-right toolbar that opens a metadata panel showing EXIF data, capture date, and GPS location. Click the coordinates and it opens the location in Google Maps in your browser. Nothing flashy, but it saves you from tabbing out to another app just to check when or where a shot was taken.

Glow: Three Styles, Two Ways to Use It

Glow lives in the Effects panel, below Grain, and it's collapsed by default — click the disclosure triangle to expand it. You'll see a style dropdown and three sliders, all inactive until you push the main Glow amount above zero.

There are three styles to choose from, each simulating a different physical or optical effect: Diffusion, Bloom, and Halation.

Diffusion — the Orton Effect, Built In

If you've built the Orton effect manually in Photoshop — duplicate your base layer, apply Gaussian blur, blend with Soft Light or Multiply, then mask and adjust opacity — Diffusion is that effect without the layer stack. Push Glow to 100 with Diffusion selected and you get that soft, dreamy look immediately.

Three sliders control it:

• Range — where in the tonal scale the glow applies. Push left and it only touches your brightest highlights; push right and it spreads into midtones and shadows.
• Spread — essentially blur strength. Left is subtler, right is stronger.
• Warmth — shifts the color overlay of the glow warmer or cooler. Works especially well on warm sunlight scenes.

Hold Option (Mac) or Alt (Windows) while dragging any of these three sliders and you get a mask view showing exactly where the glow is landing — useful for judging Range and Spread precisely instead of guessing from the full-color preview.

Bloom — Glowing Highlights

Bloom does what it sounds like: it makes your brightest areas glow outward. Same Range, Spread, and Warmth sliders, same behavior — Range controls how far into the midtones and shadows the bloom reaches, Spread controls how far it expands from the highlight, Warmth shifts its color temperature. It reads a bit more like a lens artifact than the softness of Diffusion.

Halation — Film's Red Fringe, Recreated

Halation has real photochemical roots. In film, light passes through the emulsion layers (blue, green, red) and hits an anti-halation layer behind them. Some of that light reflects back, mostly onto the red layer, producing a yellow-to-amber-to-red glow around bright lights and high-contrast edges. That's the effect this style reproduces.

Same Range and Spread sliders as before, but the third slider is Color instead of Warmth — it shifts the halation's tint along a yellow-to-red spectrum rather than cool-to-warm.

One tip worth noting: halation is a film phenomenon, so it pairs well with a bit of Grain. Increasing grain size and roughness slightly alongside halation pushes the whole image toward a filmic look rather than looking like an isolated digital effect sitting on top of a clean image.

Using Glow With Masks

Glow works as both a global tool and a local one through masking, and there's one important behavioral difference between the two.

Globally, the Glow amount slider runs from 0 to 100. Inside a mask, it runs from -100 to 100. Negative values remove glow from the masked area rather than adding it. This gives you two ways to achieve the same result: apply glow globally at full strength, then use a subject mask with the amount pushed to -100 to subtract it from a specific area (say, a bird you don't want glowing). Or start with glow off globally, apply it locally through a gradient or brush mask, then subtract it from a smaller area within that mask using the same negative-value trick.

One constraint to know: Style, Range, Spread, and Warmth/Color are global settings shared across every mask and the global adjustment. You can't set Diffusion globally and Bloom in one mask — only the amount (positive or negative) is independent per mask.

Glow and HDR

Pairing Glow with a 32-bit HDR edit is where it really stands out — enough that it's the main reason for going back through a catalog to re-edit photos that were already reworked once for HDR.

When Is Glow Coming to Lightroom?

In a word: soon. New editing tools land in Camera Raw first because Camera Raw is the engine that drives Lightroom's entire edit stack, and Lightroom inherits these features once they're ready.