Adobe's new "variance" feature in Camera Raw completely changes how you adjust colors and tones. If you regularly edit portraits, landscapes, or any imagery involving varied color ranges, it's worth understanding exactly how this tool can improve your editing efficiency and results.
Coming to you from Glyn Dewis, this informative video explores Adobe's recent update called color variance, found within the Camera Raw filter. Dewis walks you through an example with colored swatches, clearly demonstrating how this feature can unify disparate tones or amplify color differences instantly. By sampling a single color, the variance slider lets you choose whether surrounding colors shift toward a uniform hue or become distinctly more varied. Dewis showcases how this drastically speeds up retouching tasks—especially helpful when correcting uneven skin tones in portraits.
In addition to portraits, Dewis applies variance to landscape editing. Here, you can quickly emphasize subtle color differences in greenery or establish a unified palette across foliage, enhancing the aesthetic feel of an image without manual masking or intricate adjustments. The practical demonstrations Dewis gives will reveal editing approaches you may not have previously considered, showing how variance makes sophisticated edits achievable in seconds. Also, Dewis briefly previews some potential implementations as variance moves toward integration into Lightroom, something you'll likely be interested in.
What's particularly useful is the efficiency gained using variance for common editing tasks. If you're tired of repeatedly tackling redness or uneven skin tones manually, the demonstrated method can simplify your workflow. Likewise, landscape and nature shots often need careful adjustment, and increasing or reducing color variance can shift the viewer's attention or unify an overly chaotic scene. The simplicity with which Dewis accomplishes previously complicated edits might motivate you to reconsider several steps in your current editing process. Check out the video above for the full rundown.
Adobe copied this feature from Capture One, which has offered colour matching for many years. This feature has optimised countless portraits and sky blues in RAW photos over the last six years, at least for me. Innovations at Adobe are usually limited to profit figures.
I see this as a great tool. I do not know if you do Astro Milky Way's but in a majority of captures you get the yin, magenta, and yang, blue way different than the overall sky colors of Pegasus and then also you get like a baby blue sky. But what the camera captures in colors the human eye does not see so like a beach, where most MWer's go to capture due to the super dark skies and a foreground full of light and color even in the darkest of places. I find using portrait in a cameras Lrc profile to get the color of the beach sand and sometimes the white of the galactic center or white surf to get all colors in the sky including the Pegasus yin and yang.
Also for sunrise and set colors playing with all parts