What s New in Photoshop May 2026 Update

Well, Adobe has done it again with the latest Photoshop update, and that is they've given us a feature that I think every one of you is going to absolutely love. It's actually an Adobe Camera Raw. Every one of you is going to absolutely love. In fact, there's two features I think everybody will love, but they're not talking about it. Nobody's really talked about it as a big deal, and I think it's one of the biggest features I've seen this year. And then the other thing is, it's only in Adobe Camera Raw. It's not in Lightroom yet. I miss the days where Adobe Camera Raw and Lightroom were updated always together. We seem to be taking longer. The updates come to Camera Raw, and then it takes longer to get to Lightroom, but I want to show you anyway. So if you are an ACR user, make sure you're on the latest version, not just update Photoshop, but make sure you update Adobe Camera Raw as well. And of course, all questions about updating and versions should go to Adobe. Let's jump in and take a look. Now, I have opened up a raw photo into Photoshop, which will automatically open up the Adobe Camera Raw interface. If you were in Photoshop, you can use the filter menu to get to the Camera Raw filter because this feature works the same there. And what we have is we have a pretty common situation where I exposed for the sky in this photo, and what we don't see, what's really dark is the way the trees in the foreground look, which is more like this. So it's not anything I did or you did wrong in the camera. It's just the camera doesn't have the dynamic range that our eyes do. Our eyes would blend this together just fine. So it's pretty common situation where we have to come into Lightroom or Photoshop and try to fix this. Now, I don't think just moving shadows or moving exposure, I don't think it gets me to the point where I'd be happy with the photo, which is why I would typically turn to a mask to do this. Now, what I'll do is I essentially want to make the foreground brighter. There is not really a select foreground. There's a select background, but really the easiest way to me would be to do select sky. And then there's a little invert button up here, and then just hit the invert of that, which gives me the everything but the sky as part of my selection here. And most of you probably have it on the red overlay there. So I'll leave it on the red overlay for a second. And then we'd go in here and we'd increase the exposure. All right. I'll probably go a little bit too much just so we can see exactly what's happening inside of there. So I've increased the exposure. And if I zoom into the photo and zoom into those trees, you can see all along here, you can see some of the problems we have here, some of the problems we have up here, and that is very, very common. And there wasn't a good way to fix it before. But now if you look at the top of your masking panel, you're going to see a feather and an edge setting. Okay. It doesn't work in all of the masks, but it does work in a lot of them. So you'll see feather and edge at the very, very top of the panel there. So let's take a quick look here. I'm going to turn the overlay back on, switch it to white on black. I just want to show you feather is softening the edge. It's blurring the edge. Okay. And then the edge setting is actually forcing that edge to go out or inward based on what the original edge was. Okay. So you can see it's pushing the edge out a little bit. You can see it's pushing the edge in more. Okay. So if you think of white is what is selected here, white is what's selected and what will get the exposure change that I've done. I'm moving whatever changes outward or inward from where they were. All right. So let's take a look and see what that does on the photo. As we again, increase the exposure. Now we'll go over here to the feather setting and that will immediately start to help. Okay. It's not going to make it perfect, but it'll start to help. What we won't see now is that really kind of, let's go into the top right corner here. What we won't see is that really muddy type of a look to it. Now we're going to see more of a firmer edge, but it is going to have a little bit of a halo. And that's where we go to the edge setting and we can move that outward, which is not what we would want for this photo, which is going to make it worse, or you can move it in a little bit. So what we're doing here is we're essentially feathering that edge, which is really just another word for softening it. It's blurring the edge to make it look more realistic because we can't ever have a perfect edge around these trees. It won't exist because of wind, because of lens issues, because the pixels are so small by this point. You're never going to have a perfect edge. So that's why we're able to soften or feather that selection. And that's why we need both of these tools, just the feather and just an edge movement here is not going to get the job done. We need them both to work, to get this to look good. So as you look through here, it's done a really good job of adding here. I probably would not go this quite that bright as far as I went on there, but that's a, we can probably even go a little brighter and maybe even open up some of the shadows on there as well. Okay. So that's definitely helped. And that's going to help with any type of photo that's got a selection edge on it. Just know that you can use both of those tools for a lot of your selections. When you create a new mask, you're going to see there's a bunch of different ones on here. So something like the linear gradient or the radial gradient that that's already got a feathered edge to it. So you're not going to see the ability to do that there. If I take a linear gradient on here, you're not going to see those adjustments on there because it's already feathered by the nature of the mask and the selection that we use there. All right. So that was feature number one. Feature number two, let's scroll down here because it's going to be inside of the masking panel. And speaking of inside the masking panel, you know what is not inside the masking panel, but I definitely think you're going to want to look at is my Lightroom for Wildlife Photographers course. I've recently released this course. So it covers my whole workflow inside of Lightroom for Wildlife Photographers, everything from getting your photos into Lightroom. It's not a basic class. I assume you know how to import photos, but how I do this for my wildlife photos, but more importantly, how I do my culling strategies for wildlife photos. And I give you two different ways in this course, the more softer, gentler side, and then the ruthless side of culling, which is probably what I use more for wildlife photography where I'll give you a preview to it. And it's basically every photo it's guilty and deleted until proven good. And it just helps me, you know, just not keep as many photos that I don't need because most of the time, all those series all look the same. Then I get into the editing side of things. So everything from working with the tone in your photos, the exposure, the brightness, the color, the contrast, doing that all selectively. We talk about some image quality issues like noise reduction and image sizing all for a complete workflow. And then there's some really good start to finish photos at the end of that. So the course is on sale. If you want to find out more, just take a look at the link below. Let's get back to the tutorial. Okay. So we left off back where we're going to take a look at our second feature here, which is inside the masking panel as well. And it's color grading. So up until this point, we've had color grading as a panel inside of the main area, but we haven't had color grading as a mask or the ability to add into a mask. So why would you use this? I'm not going to go through a full color grading tutorial, but you know, this would be a good example, right? Maybe I want to add a little bit of warmth to the highlights in this mask here. Okay. Some of the highlights that we have in the foreground there. If I add it, if I did color grading globally, it's going to start adding warmth to the edges of the clouds. Cause there's a lot of highlights there. But now since I have a mask that only affects the foreground, I can go down here to the highlights and I can start to affect just the highlights inside of the mast area that, that, that we're, we're looking to, to work with here. So that's a feature. I know a lot of people that use color grading. It's not something I use quite a bit for my landscape and a while they photos, but that's a feature that I know people that do use color grading have really been looking for. And then let's go ahead. We'll click on open. I'll just show you a small feature that we do have also in the main Photoshop interface. And what you'll see is it's going to be a tool inside, or it's going to be an option located inside the remove tool. So you can see there's the remove tool. When you turn that on, you've got some options up in the top bar up there. One of them, it lets you determine whether or not you use generative AI for the remove tool. So you can turn it off. You can turn it on or just generally leave it on auto. Let the software figure it out. I don't, I don't really care what it uses. So just let the software figure out what's best. But down at the bottom there, you'll see that we have an option for generative AI processing. We can process this in the cloud or on the device. The cloud's typically going to be better, but it's going to be slower as well. The device option, which I don't have because my hardware doesn't support it. My laptop is probably going on almost six years now, but it still feels pretty fast, but this is starting to show some age to it because even though the laptop feels fast, I'm going to start getting restricted on what settings that I can use here, but you can turn it onto the device. So the device will generally use the graphics card on the device. It'll generally be a little bit faster and it doesn't need cloud access. So if you don't have an internet access or whatever you're doing at the time, you don't have access to the internet, then that's one of the options that you could use there. You could click on, learn more to find out the hardware requirements. But if I were to do that, there's a person in the background here, hit the check box. The way I usually know whether or not it used generative AI or not is because it happened so fast. If I had generative AI on and I remove something really small down here, like these little branches down there. Once I click the little check box up here, you're probably going to see a progress bar appear at the top there. That's generally how I know when it's using AI or not, because when it happens as fast as it did with that person, then I usually know it's just using the default content aware fill technology that's been around in Photoshop for quite a while. So hopefully that gives you an idea of what this feature is. And I have to assume, although it's only in Adobe Camera Raw, it'll make its way over into Lightroom, hopefully sooner than later. I might have to become a Bridge Adobe Camera Raw user in the meantime, because I really like that feature. Also, there's another masking feature that is also just in Adobe Camera Raw. So if you're interested in that one, that's a great video to go watch next.