Today’s Question: With the ability to select people automatically in Photoshop as well as in Camera Raw [or Lightroom Classic], do you recommend selecting people when processing the raw image in Camera Raw or after opening the image in Photoshop?
Tim’s Quick Answer: If you’re using Camera Raw (rather than Lightroom Classic) with Photoshop, I generally prefer to apply targeted adjustments in Photoshop rather than Camera Raw for greater workflow flexibility.
More Detail: There are tools for automatically selecting people (or specific portions of people) in Photoshop, Camera Raw, Lightroom Classic, and Lightroom, and they all produce similar (and generally good) results. Whether you select people in Photoshop or Camera Raw (or Lightroom Classic or Lightroom) depends in part on your workflow preferences.
If you’re using Camera Raw and Photoshop, it is common to only process a single image once in Camera Raw and then work exclusively in Photoshop after that. Because of that, I generally prefer to apply targeted adjustments in Photoshop rather than Camera Raw. That way, you can always return to the targeted adjustment in Photoshop later rather than having to start over with the raw capture if you wanted to make a change to a targeted adjustment.
Note, by the way, that you can use the new option for selecting people with the Object Selection tool in Photoshop. With an image opening people open, and the Object Selection tool active, click the “Select people” button on the Options bar. This will bring up a dialog where you can choose a person and then click on the applicable buttons for the portions of the person you want to select. Then click the Apply button, and you’ll have a selection that you can use as the basis of a targeted adjustment with an adjustment layer, for example.
By creating the selection and targeted adjustment in Photoshop rather than Camera Raw, you have more flexibility in terms of refining those adjustments, as long as you work with adjustment layers and include those layers when saving the image. Later you can open the layered image and refine the layer mask or the adjustment settings for your targeted adjustment.
Note that for Lightroom Classic and Lightroom users, because you can easily return to any image to refine your adjustments, there’s no need to send the image to Photoshop to take advantage of the people selection feature. You can simply use the People option for the masking feature to apply targeted adjustments involving people.
