In our standard editing workflows, the Phoblographer’s editors tend to use Capture One mostly when working with images. But that doesn’t mean that we won’t dip into Lightroom every now and again. Recently though we noted that Adobe has made major updates to Camera RAW since our 2023 review of the program. And so we not only updated the review, but we wanted to see if Bridge and Camera RAW could replace your Lightroom workflow.
The updated text from our Adobe Camera RAW review is below. But if you want to see the full review of the program, you can check it out here. Also be sure to check out our Adobe Bridge review.
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
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.
