Adobe Camera Raw 18.5 Adds AI Blemish Removal and a Faster Vectorscope

Adobe has released Camera Raw 18.5, and the headline feature is Remove Blemishes, an AI powered tool that finds and removes skin blemishes, moles and freckles from a photo automatically rather than asking a retoucher to paint over each one by hand. It sits inside the same panel as Camera Raw's existing healing and generative removal tools, so photographers get it without leaving their usual raw processing workflow in Photoshop, Lightroom or Bridge.

The release also expands the Vectorscope, giving colourists a clearer read on hue and saturation while grading, and adds a Render to DNG option that bakes edits into a new DNG file rather than only exporting to JPEG or TIFF. Neither is as attention grabbing as automatic retouching, but both are the kind of workflow detail that colour and retouching specialists have been asking Adobe for.

Camera Raw ships as the engine behind Lightroom's develop module and Photoshop's Camera Raw filter, so this update reaches a huge working population of photographers and retouchers without needing a separate install or a new subscription tier. That matters for a studio like ours: any client shoot that goes through stills retouching now has a faster first pass on skin work built into the tools we already use, which frees up time for the compositing and grading choices that actually need a human eye.

The bigger pattern here is Adobe folding AI assistance into the boring, high volume parts of a workflow rather than only the flashy generative ones. Blemish removal will not make anyone's showreel, but it is exactly the kind of repetitive task that AI tools are well suited to, and its arrival inside Camera Raw rather than as a separate paid plugin is a sign of how normalised this kind of automation has become in professional photo workflows.