Adobe Camera Raw Review: A Major Improvement

Last Updated on 05/07/2025 by Chris Gampat

The past decade has shown photographers that they should shoot tons and tons of photos only to worry about it all later in post-production. And it’s resulted in many other problems that need to be solved. The old way used Adobe Bridge and Photoshop to selectively edit only a few photos. That’s where Adobe Camera RAW came in. Many photographers still go by this method. And thankfully, Adobe Camera RAW got some major new upgrades.

Yes, we know Adobe Camera RAW has been out for a long time. But we’ve never done a formalized review of it. So here it is!

The Big Picture: Adobe Camera RAW Review Conclusions

Adobe Camera Raw is a good option for photographers who shoot very few photos or do things in an old-school way. It’s best combined with Adobe Bridge, where you can figure out which photos you want to use first. Once you’ve narrowed it down to less than 7, you can open those photos in Photoshop. This will then open up Camera Raw. After making your edits, you can do everything you need to the image, otherwise.

Think of it as a more intense version of Lightroom, specifically being best for those who shoot very few photos, like portrait and headshot photographers. Alternatively, Lightroom is better for sports and photojournalism shooters.

With the latest AI Noise Reduction, Camera RAW becomes a much more powerful tool for those who are super selective.

We’re rating Adobe Camera RAW with five out of five stars. In a time where photographers shoot way too many images, Camera RAW is a much better option to keep the selection to a minimum.

Pros

• Great AI Noise Reduction
• Really designed to focus on just a few images
• Gives the photographer a lot of ability to do more later on to specific photos.

Cons

• Some may think that it’s not as good for batch editing. And in that case, I’d say you should just use Lightroom and Lightroom Classic instead.

Gear Used

We tested out Adobe Camera RAW on a 2019 iMac 27 inch computer.

Innovations

As of April 2023, Adobe introduced AI Noise Reduction into their products. Of the big brands, it probably does the best job.

Ease of Use

If you’re used to working with Lightroom or Lightroom Classic, you’ll be a bit weirded out by how Camera RAW works. Indeed, you most likely get it with part of your plan. But it works totally differently. You bring up Camera Raw in one of two ways:

• Opening up Finder and then opening up the RAW file in Photoshop
• Looking at photos in Bridge and then opening up the RAW in Photoshop

Essentially, Camera RAW is part of Photoshop. And when you open it up, you’re treated to a similar interface as Lightroom. All the sliders you wish for are right there. When you’re done, simply open the file up in Photoshop if you want to do more retouches, like using the liquify tool or more.

What’s New in Adobe Camera RAW (Update May 2025)

• Optical Blur and bokeh effect with lens blur
• HDR editing
• Targeted color adjustments with point color
• Remove unwanted objects with generative remove
• Content credentials additions
• Remove distractions with generative remove: same as generative remove
• Generative expand
• Quickly edit specific elements in landscape photos with Select landscape
• Batch edit in the remove tool

Image Quality

As far as the development of photos goes, the image quality here all comes from using Adobe’s engines. Most photographers are perfectly fine with it. But there are times when you might prefer Capture One just a bit more. If you care a lot more about color and low ISO image quality output, Capture One is clearly the superior winner here. That’s been the result that the industry has known and noticed for years. But where Adobe Camera Raw really rises above is with the AI Noise Reduction.

AI Noise Reduction

There are two camera systems where the AI Noise reduction is majorly useful. First off, consider Micro Four Thirds. Specifically, consider OM System and how noisy their sensors are at higher ISOs. If you’re photographing birds and wildlife, you’ve got no choice but to use high ISO settings. While the camera sensors will create a lot of noise, the AI Noise Reduction in Camera Raw more or less negates it. Of course, you’ll also lose quite a bit of sharpness. So you’ll have to set your own perfect balance.

Nonetheless, OM System has said for years that Capture One does a better job with their RAW files. But if you’re considering high ISO output, I’m really not sure that’s the case.

This is also a big issues with Canon’s high megapixel imaging sensors. Both the Canon EOS R7 and the Canon EOS R5 can produce a lot of noise at high ISO settings. But if you balance the noise reduction just right, that issue almost totally goes away.

Above is an image where we increased the exposure in Camera raw by around two and a half stops. Of course, it introduced a lot of imaging noise.

The photo above is the edit to reduce the noise and bring back highlight details. It’s not bad at all. But it’s also still not perfectly great.

Can Adobe Camera Raw and Bridge Replace Lightroom?

We were very curious to see whether or not Adobe Camera Raw and Bridge could replace Lightroom together. And so we did a bit of a deeper dive and investigation into this. For reference, I’m on a 2019 27-inch iMac, which still uses the older Intel chips. Lightroom tends to crash a lot for me and that’s one of the reasons why I tend to go for Capture One so much more.

First off, I had to make Camera RAW and Bridge look a bit more like Lightroom. So to do that, I set Bridge up to the filmstrip workspace and made some adjustments to the scene a bit more. Picking and selecting is a bit more annoying than it is in Lightroom for sure where I can easily just have the Caps-Lock button enabled and then press “P” or “X” easily. Here, it’s more about star ratings and flag colors. That’s a bit more like Capture One. Luckily, I tend to star-rate my images in-camera before I get to the computer. That’s because I want to spend as little time editing as possible.

In Lightroom, I can select all my images and make a simple batch edit. You can also do this in Camera Raw, but it takes longer — though sometimes that’s not the case. I can make edits to a single image, highlight all of them, right click, select sync settings, and then select what settings get synced. Then it just works. Better yet, the images look like there’s been less AI enhancements than there were from Lightroom.

But there’s more than just that:

• You can fine-tune how the bokeh looks with the optical blur and bokeh effect tool, and it works very well. I can make a photo from a Fujifilm X series camera look like it was shot on the GFX system instead
• Color adjustments with the point color option can make skin editing and color editing a bit easier, but only to a certain point.
• Generative remove is pretty great and can eliminate distractions better than I feel Lightroom does if you only select the “remove” option. To clarify this statement further, it was much easier and faster to do this in Camera Raw.
• Content credential additions are super nice
• The Generative expand feature works surprisingly very well and in an acceptable way that I didn’t think was possible before. It works well even when using special lens filters like those from Spektrem Effects.

This — my friends — is the version of Adobe editing that I missed so very much. After a while, everything that I did in Lightroom looked like it was edited with AI and looked overly cooked. But when editing in Adobe Bridge and Adobe Camera Raw, I get an editing experience that rivals Capture One. You can even sync up the AI edits if you did manipulations to things like Lens Blur and stuff like that. Frankly, this is a breath of relief and akin to rediscovering something that you’ve been looking for in the boxes strewn around your apartment that you simply gave up on — until it appeared. There’s a time in my life when I would’ve felt like ancestors and good spirits were deciding to bless me, and this would’ve been one of those situations.

Camera RAW is a much nicer interface if you both want to do more specific edits to photographs and even if you want to sync those edits to photographs across the board. In fact, I’d even say that this editing standard is superior to Lightroom Classic. At a certain point several years ago in the past decade, every photographer was complaining about Lightroom Classic so much so that they made the program called Lightroom.

However, it’s not as totally capable as Lightroom. And here’s a big list of how it differs for me:

• Export Naming: still very limited. The Phoblographer has very specific naming patterns for our images. We tend to use the following: (Name of the Photographer)(The Phoblographer)(What the name of the job is, such as Nikon Zf review and specifics)(EXIF Data). We can’t get that specific in Adobe Camera RAW or Bridge
• Plugins like JPEG Mini can’t be used. However, Bridge and RAW do a solid job with exporting images and making them very small to the point where I arguably don’t need the plugin
• I can’t retouch skin to make it smoother in a simple way
• Editing Captions is tougher. You have to select the images, right-click on file info, make edits, and then press OK.

Honestly, if these things were fixed, I’d only edit in Bridge and Camera Raw and never touch Lightroom again.

Who Should Buy It?

If you’re on the Adobe Creative Cloud Photography Plan, you’ve already got access to it. And if you’ve been using Lightroom for years, I strongly suggest you give this a shot instead. Where Lightroom and Lightroom CC let you edit and export a ton of files at once, using Bridge and Camera RAW together is more about going through lots of files and only exporting a few really key ones. Those key images will also most likely have more edits done to them than is acceptable in the Photojournalism world.

Features

From the official Adobe page:

Adobe Camera Raw, which lets you import and enhance raw images, has been a must-have tool for professional photographers right since it was first released in 2003. Applications that support Adobe Camera Raw include Photoshop, Photoshop Elements, After Effects, and Bridge. Additionally, Adobe Lightroom is built upon the same powerful raw image processing technology that powers Adobe Camera Raw.