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Known Participant
October 28, 2025
Question

What cameras support support depth range in ACR 18.0?

  • October 28, 2025
  • 1 reply
  • 85 views

There is a new masking feature in Adobe Camera Raw 18.0 called depth range. It is only supported if the photo contains depth info. What cameras generate raw files that contain depth information?

The depth range is greyed  out for raw files from my Nikon Z7II. Lens blur works.

1 reply

Conrad_C
Community Expert
Community Expert
October 29, 2025

This could be changing, but I’m under the impression that most cameras that record depth are smartphone cameras. For example, my two-year-old iPhone 15 does, and I’m pretty sure several Android models do too. But even if a smartphone camera can record depth, it might not do it in all of its modes, and maybe not in its default mode. I tried a few of my iPhone pictures in Bridge and Camera Raw, and it looks like the only photos that contain depth info into are the ones where the camera was in a mode such as Portrait. The reason is that one of the features of Portrait mode is being able to control the focus point and depth of field after the shot, because Portrait mode stores a depth map. The way the phone creates the depth map is by having actual depth-sensing hardware in its camera, such as LIDAR, 3D dot projection, or multi-lens parallax, and then saving the generated depth map in HEIC image format. Because that hardware is required for high resolution depth sensing, traditional optical-only single-lens cameras can’t create a useful depth map, as far as I know.

 

Lens Blur works on your image because Camera Raw/Lightroom generates a depth map for a plain 2D image by doing AI analysis of the image. So it’s guessing, which might be why Lens Blur often has imperfect edges and inaccurate depth for certain details, in my experience anyway. However, if an image includes an actual depth map, Lens Blur can use that instead of guessing, so the results should be much better. When an actual depth map is available, in Lens Blur you’ll see a Use Device Depth option.

 

I just tried out the Depth Range mask for the first time thanks to your question, on an iPhone 15 image taken using Portrait mode. In the quick and dirty demo below, you can see how I applied a masked Exposure adjustment based on a Depth Range mask that I edit, so that as I adjust the depth range, the darkened parts shift not up and down in the picture, but based on the focus distance. The mask turns red when I hold down the modifier key to show the mask overlay.