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Adobe has added another tool to Adobe Camera Raw (ACR) that’s yet to make its way across to Lightroom Classic. This one is called Glow and you’re going to love it if you’re into landscape, portrait, flower, garden or travel photography. It’s also great for black and white, reminiscent of the darkroom technique of softening a print by holding a diffusion filter under the enlarger.
How to send photos from Lightroom Classic to ACR
If you photography plan includes Lightroom Classic and Photoshop it’s easy to send your photos from Lightroom to ACR and test Glow out for yourself.
1. Go to the Edit In menu and look for the Open As Smart Object in Photoshop option (it’s at the bottom).
2. In Photoshop, double-click the photo thumbnail in Layers to open it in ACR.
3. Make your adjustments in ACR. When you’re done, click OK to open the image in Photoshop and save it as a PSD or Tiff file. The new file appears stacked next to the original Raw file in Lightroom Classic’s Grid View.
What does the Glow tool do?
The Glow tool adds a soft diffusion to your photos, either to the entire image, the highlights, or part of the photo selected by a mask. There are three types of glow:
Diffusion: A softening effect applied universally across the photo. It’s like the Orton Effect that landscape photographers love. Useful for landscape, flower and garden photography.
Bloom: A deeper glow effect that makes the highlights bleed into the rest of the photo. It’s stronger than Diffusion, so you’re likely to use this one sparingly.
Halation: Highlight glow with red fringing, similar to what you get with older types of film. Great for emulating film (combine with adding Grain) or for vintage style effects.
Experimenting with the Glow tool
To test the Glow tool out, go ahead and open up one of your Raw files in ACR. Go to Glow (you’ll find it under Effects) and move the Glow slider from zero to 50. You’ll see the effect straight away. You can click the eye icon next to the Style menu at any time to turn the Glow effect on and off, so you can see the difference it makes.
Changing the Glow style
The default Style setting is Diffusion, which gives you the Orton Effect that landscape photographers love. You can also try Bloom, which gives a stronger effect with highlights bleeding into the shadows. Halation adds red or orange fringing around the brightest highlights, without affecting the rest of the photo. The screenshots below show the difference.
Above: Glow 50, Style Diffusion
Above: Glow 50, Style Bloom
Above: Glow 50, Style Halation
You can also play with the Range and Spread sliders. Range pushes the effect into the midtones and shadows. Spread pushes the glow effect further out from the highlights. The easiest way to see the difference is to set Style to Bloom and push the sliders up to their maximum settings of 100.
Above: Glow 50, Style Bloom, Range 100
Above: Glow 50, Style Bloom, Spread 100
Adding warmth to Glow
The Warmth slider adds an orange color cast to the photo’s glow when you move it right, and a blue one when you move it left (great for foggy or wintry scenes).
Above: Glow 50, Style Diffusion, Warmth 50
Above: Glow 50, Style Diffusion, Warmth 100
If you set Style to Halation, then the color spectrum of the Warmth slider changes to yellow-orange (instead of blue-yellow). Use it to make the fringing more red or more yellow.
Using Glow with masks
Once you’ve got the hang of using Glow you can experiment with using masks to make local adjustments. For example, below you can see the difference between applying Glow to all the image (left) and to the model only, using a Subject mask (right).
With landscape and garden photos you can apply Glow to the entire photo or to the sky using a Sky mask.
Above: Glow (diffusion) applied to entire photo.
Above: Glow (diffusion) applied to Sky mask.
The differences are subtle in these examples. You’ll see it more clearly when you get into ACR and start exploring the possibilities.
A couple of things you need to know about Glow and masks:
1. Within a mask the Glow slider has a range of -100 to +100 (rather than zero to +100). This is so you can apply a positive setting globally, and then use a mask to remove that glow effect from part of the photo.
2. The only Glow setting you can independently adjust in a mask is the Glow slider. The Style, Range, Spread and Warmth settings are global. Change any of these within a mask and you change them in every mask that applies Glow plus the Glow tool in the Edit menu.
In other words, you can’t apply two different types of Glow to the same photo.
More Glow examples
Here are a few more examples of using Glow.
Above: Flower photography – I set Glow to 50 and Style to Diffusion for this softening effect.
Above: Travel photography – I set Glow to 50 and Style to Bloom, emphasizing the glow of the lights in the night sky.
Above: Portrait photography – I set Glow to 100 and Style to Halation, to get the red glow effect on the model’s hair. I had to set Range and Spread to 100 for the full effect.
Above: Landscape photography – I set Glow to 50 and Style to Diffusion for an Orton Effect like glow beloved of landscape photographers.
Glow and the Alt key
One last tip – hold the Alt (PC) or Option (Mac) key down when you adjust the Range, Spread or Warmth sliders to see a mask view that shows where ACR is applying Glow (see screenshot below). In the mask view, targeted areas are shown in white.
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