Lessons

Lesson Info

Fixing Isolated Problems

This is Lightroom Classic: the Complete Guide. Let's take a look at what we've covered thus far. In the first week, we tried to develop a firm foundation for how to think about Lightroom, how to work with Lightroom Catalog files, and how to set up like how you organize your pictures, so it's in a useful way, instead of just kind of randomly throwing things together. Then, we went into the second week, and we started out with organizing and working on projects, so if we needed to put together a book or a slide show or anything else, we learned how to do that, so we could be nice and organized. On the second day, we learned how to make our images searchable using key words, and ideally the goal is to make it so you can find just about any image you can think of in five seconds or less, and that was the first step in doing so. We'll have other lessons later on that will truly make that a possibility. Well, so that means we've gone through seven days out of 20, and we have 13 days to go. S...

o, what are we gonna cover today? Well today, we're gonna talk about fixing problems that don't affect the entire image, and that means we're gonna talk about isolated adjustments. You need to just fix the shiny spot on somebody's forehead, or there's some area in a background where the normal adjustment sliders, which can isolate things based on brightness and possibly color, won't allow you say to only affect somebody's face, or only affect the forehead, so we'll have to come in and use these special tools. So, in here we're gonna get into Lightroom, and I'm gonna start talking about things like the adjustment brush and the graduated filter, so let's get to it. First, let's talk about cropping. So here I have a series of images that have actually already been cropped, but I wanna show you how much cropping can transform an image and the settings involved in doing so, so we'll just start with any image. I'm going to go to the Develop module. Usually I do that by pressing the letter D for develop, just 'cause it's very easy to remember, or I can go to the top of my screen up here, to the actually Develop module. That gets me to the same spot, regardless if I use my keyboard or not. Then, just below the histogram is a series of tools across here. The one on the far left is the crop tool. If you want to access it with your keyboard, you can type the letter R. When I'm in the crop tool, I can simply move my mouse on top of the image, and I'll find a cropping rectangle here where I can grab either the corners or the sides and reposition it. In here, you can see that I was cropping out a blue object near the lower right, and then I pulled in a little bit of the cropping rectangle at the bottom just to make it so there's a little less open space down there. Well, with this, in order to be able to freely crop to various settings, where you're not limited to going to a square or a specific aspect ratio, over here there is a lock symbol, and you notice that lock symbol is open at the moment. If I were to click on the menu that's to the left of it, I could limit it to force me to get a square crop, or one of these other aspect ratios, and if I were to do that, then you'll find that lock symbol will close, and then now I'm limited, so I'm forced into created a square crop, so if I was gonna do a square crop, I would have to think of this quite differently. If I wanna get that full sign in there, I'll have to include a little bit of that blue object as well. When you're done cropping, all you need to do is click on the crop tool a second time, and you'll finish up your cropping and you can move on. Sometimes, though, what I wanna do is crop more than one picture, and the problem with doing that is if I try to crop one image, and then I try to use the arrow keys to switch between pictures, which is what I commonly do when adjusting pictures, well, if you're in the middle of cropping a picture, and you use those arrow keys, you're just gonna be moving the cropping rectangle around in your picture, 'cause that's one way of fine tuning the position of the cropping rectangle. Well, if you wanna switch between images, there's a trick. It's the same trick we use when we talk about key wording. And that is when you're typing in a key word, and you use the arrow keys, it thinks you wanna go between the individual letters you've been typing instead of switching images, so the way you switch between images is hold down the command key, which is control in Windows, and then use the arrow keys. So therefore I can be in the crop tool, and I can still switch to another image. Now, in this image, you can see that I cropped out some cars on the left side. And then I just tried to tighten up the composition a little bit, so the shadow that my wife is casting here begins near the edge of the frame, and this pole on the edge just kind of finishes the image that's there, but I might decide over here that I'm gonna use this image for a particular purpose. Let's say I was gonna have this displayed on a projector, or on an HDTV. Well, the resolution of the most common projector and television is right down here. It's 1920 by 1080. When I choose this, it's not really gonna scale the image to that exact dimension. Instead, it's only thinking about the shape, the width and height proportions that that is. And it's really the proportion of 16 by 9. So if I end up choosing that, then I might need to fine tune my cropping a little bit, so I don't cut off the shadow that's there, and I might choose to crop this image slightly differently. But that's when I end up using this, and I find that whenever I get close to being square, I try to go to exactly square. Otherwise it feels a little bit off, if my brain sees something that it thinks is close to square, but then it feels like it's not quite. So I try to snap to a particular size when I get close to it. If you find that a choice you need is not in this menu, like I print 13 by 19 inch prints, and I have to think mentally to figure out which one of these would be the proportions for 13 by 19, well, right here is a choice called Enter Custom, and right there is where I can type in that I want 19 inches by 13, but these are not inches. These are proportions. It's only when you go to export your images, or print your images, that it actually defines the exact size. So here, you get the right proportions, and then when you export or print, in those areas is where you're actually gonna find the choices for inches, where you define the final choice. Click OK, and now I can come in here, and down here at the bottom will be ones that I've typed in, so these you might not have the exact same choices there. But now if I know I'm gonna print on 13 by 19 paper, that would be a good choice to choose here, so that if I don't crop the image specifically for that kind of paper, the problem is then, when I'm in the print module, I'm just gonna have the choice of fill the sheet of paper. If I turn it on, so the image fills the entire paper, it'll be centered, and my crop will be kind of determined by the print module, instead of me, so I would much rather do it here. All right, let's go to another image. Again, I'll do the command key and the right arrow. That's gonna switch to the next image. Here's an example of a one-to-one crop, meaning I have a square. You see the lock symbol there is turned on, so if I attempt to adjust this, it's gonna make sure that it stays at a square, and if I want to be able to freely adjust it, all I need to do is click on the lock symbol to unlock it, and then if I come in here and attempt to do this, you can see I can make it so it's no longer square. You could also straighten an image. You have a slider here that allows you to rotate your cropping, and you'll see the image rotates, so you can see the end result, or there's a little thing over here. It's supposed to look like a spirit level, you know the kind of level with the little air drop inside of water? I'm gonna come over here, and I see a sign that should be nice and straight. I'm gonna click on the top edge of it, and then I'm gonna drag across that, and get the right edge as well, and as long as I get that to line up with something that should be perfectly horizontal or perfectly vertical, when I let go, it will figure out the proper angle, and in this case I can see that I shot this pretty straight, 'cause it didn't have to do all that much of a rotation. And there's also an Auto button here, and that's going to try to figure it out for you. And in this case, when I clicked it, it did straighten the image, and by just the littlest bit different than what I did when I attempted to do it manually, so it would do a pretty good job with that. So we have all sorts of controls here. For our crop, there is one more down here at the bottom you might wanna know about. It's called Constrain to Image, and that is any time you've done something that makes your picture so it's not a perfect rectangle. The examples of that might be if you do any kind of perspective correction. You know how you take a picture that tilts up shooting a building, how the top of the building will end up looking smaller than the bottom? Well we can correct for that in Lightroom, but when we do, our image gets squished, and it's no longer a perfect rectangle, or if you stitch a panorama in Lightroom, you're gonna end up with a non-rectangular result most of the time, and if this check box is turned on, it's gonna not allow you to include any white space, any extra stuff that's not actually part of your image. And so you just need to be aware of that. So if you work with panoramas, you work with lens corrections, if you need that extra space, I might have that turned off, and then I can always add information in when I get to Photoshop, do some retouching to add stuff. All right, so, sometimes when I crop, or most of the time when I crop, I'm just cropping out distracting elements. Other times, I'm trying to straighten. In this case, I was straightening the horizon. And other times, I'm trying to make it so I perfectly fill a sheet of paper or a screen, and that's really when I need to get in there. When I'm done cropping and working everything, I'm just gonna type the letter G to go back to the grid view, and now let's talk about other features where we can work on isolated areas of the image. Let's talk about spot removal. Oftentimes when you're out shooting, if you end up changing lenses on your camera, a little bit of dust might end up getting into your camera and fall on the sensor of the camera. When that happens, you're gonna end up with little dark circles in your image. So here I'll take an image. I'm gonna type the letter D to go to the Develop module, and in here if I zoom up, I can see one such area right here. You see this little kind of out of focus dark area, and there's another one right there. Well, if we wanna get rid of those, and in this case, I think my lens was quite dirty. Yeah, I see another one up here at the top. You're gonna more easily see them in skies and other simple areas, and I doubt I'm gonna see much down on the building, just because there's so much more detail to distract from it. So in that same toolbar that's just below the histogram, I'm gonna click on a tool to the right of the crop tool, and if you wanna get to that with your keyboard, you type the letter Q. And, with that active, I can move on top of my image, and then if I wanna change the size of the circle that's here, I can use the scroll wheel on my mouse, or if I have a track pad, I use two fingers on the track pad, and go up or down, or if none of that works for some reason, 'cause you have an unusual input device, there is simply a choice over here called Size. Then, I can control if Lightroom can affect the image all the way out to the edge of my brush, or if this should fade out by adjusting the Feather setting, and the Feather setting I usually leave at zero, whenever I'm getting rid of these little sensor dust spots. Just so you know, if you wanna change it using your mouse, remember the scroll wheel on your mouse controls the size. If you hold down shift, and do the same thing, it instead controls the feathering. So you don't always have to go to the right side of your screen and manually adjust it. You're welcome to do it using your mouse. So what I want is I want this circle to be just the littlest bit larger than the speck I'm trying to remove. What I really want is I want that circle to not touch the speck at all. I want it to be touching the surroundings instead, and then I just go on top of a speck. I click and let go, and Lightroom will pick an area from the surroundings to copy from, and you'll see a second circle appear, and it's showing you that it's copying from this area, and it's placing it there. It doesn't just do that, though. It also adjusts the brightness and color of what it's copied to make sure it matches the surroundings. And so now I can just go over here and click on these various specks, and if I'm zoomed out like I am right now, it might be hard to figure out where they all are. I think I had an extremely dirty sensor on this day, and right now though I'm only seeing a few of them, so there's a feature that helps you find all the specks within your picture. It's at the bottom of my screen. It's called Visualize Spots. And if I turn it on, I'll get an alternative view of my picture, and I also have a slider to adjust its sensitivity, and if I move it around, you can find that at certain points those spots become relatively obvious in the image, and you can see how extremely dirty my sensor was here. Now ideally when I get rid of a spot, I don't want this circle to be really, really big, kind of like this. Ideally, it would be just the tiniest bit larger than the spot, just so that each little circle touches the surrounding image, and then it would work fine. But, if it's a blue sky, you usually can get away with having it a bit bigger, and I'm just gonna come in here and click on each one of these. Now, those sensor dust spots are usually in the same location in all your images, and that's because that dust fell on your camera sensor and you just kept shooting, and the dust didn't move, so it's still in the same spot. So, I'll show you in a moment how to retouch more than one picture at a time, and then this can end up being much faster to work on a group of images. Now when you do this though, you'll find that on occasion, you'll click on a sensor dust spot like these, and it won't copy from an appropriate area. Instead, it'll copy from another spot that already has a sensor dust speck, so that you are in effect transplanting that one to a different position, or it'll end up copying from the edge of a bridge, or a cloud, or something else, and it just did that, actually not on the one I just made. I'm gonna hit the delete key to get rid of that, but the one previous to it, this one. If you look at where it copied from, it copied from the edge of some clouds, and that's not the appropriate detail to have in there. If that ever happens, where you just clicked, and you notice that it copied from an area that's inappropriate, on your keyboard, right near the shift key is the forward slash key, and if you press that, it will force it to copy from a different area. It just means pick a different spot. So if I click on an area. Let's see if we can get it to mess up again. Usually it's gonna mess up when you're close to an object, like close to the edge of a cloud. Come on, mess up. We'll work close to the edge of a building. In fact, right here I'm touching a building, and that means it should copy from an area that also touches the building, and we'll see if it does. It actually did. But if you ever see it mess up, that's when you press that forward slash key, and I usually press it up to three times, meaning if it messes up on the second try, I'll give it a third try, and after three tries, if it's still messing up on where it's copying from, like it just insists on copying from detail that's inappropriate, that's when I'll manually change it. And so the way you can manually change things is if, when you click, you'll see two circles. The one circle indicates where you're retouching. The other circle is where you're copying from, you can simply grab the other circle and drag it, and therefore tell it exactly where to copy from, and that's what I'll do if I've attempted to correct it three different times with my keyboard, and it's messed up all three times. I also see a few of these in the building. At least that's what I'm assuming these areas are. If I'm not sure, I'll turn off the Visualize Spots check box, and in this case, I can't really tell, 'cause it's so dark, and so I might need to go down here to my adjustment panel, and maybe just bring up the exposure or bring up the shadow slider to see what's in there, and I see like right here, that looks like a huge piece of probably, I don't know, some lint or something that went on my sensor. You can click and drag across an area. You don't have to just click and let go. So if it's not a circular area, go ahead and click and drag. Just make sure you completely cover up the problem area before you let go, and usually you're gonna see these circles on your image, and they can be distracting. Like right now, I can't tell if it copied from a good area or not, so at the bottom of my screen, there's an area called Tool Overlay. And the default setting for this is set to I believe Always, which means you're always gonna see all these little circles on your picture. I prefer to change it to the setting called Auto. With Auto, what happens is you only see these circles that represent you've done your retouching while your mouse is in the picture. The moment you move your mouse out of the picture, they go away, and therefore you can evaluate a clean version of the image to see if it picked from a good area. If it didn't, I again hit that forward slash key to force it to pick from a different area until it does a good job, or I can manually intervene. So I'm gonna get rid of just a few other spots here. And I'm not sure if this is from my sensor or not. It might just be a dirty spot on the building, but remember I can click and drag. All right, so we've done a pretty good job of cleaning that up. When I'm done, I just click on the tool a second time to disable it, and in this case, I adjusted my exposure just so I could see the dark portion of my image. I might wanna get my exposure back to its default setting if that's where it started. I can do that by double clicking on the slider. That always resets things to their defaults, in this case just resetting the exposure slider. Then I'll type the letter G to go back to the grid view, and here are some other images shot in the same location. If I were to select all of those images, then I could look at any one of those images just by clicking within the image to make it the most selected image, the image that has the lighter background, and then if I go to the Develop module, either by clicking on the word Develop or typing the letter D, I could work on this image, but, since I have more than one picture currently selected, then there's a little button down here at the bottom that's gonna determine if all of those other images are affected or not. It's called Auto Sync. You turn it on and off with the little light switch right here. So if you click that, you can just see it has now the word Sync, which means you'd have to click that to manually sync between two images. Or if it's in the up position, then anything I do to this picture will also affect all other images that are currently selected, and therefore I could come in here and retouch these images. I'll turn on my Visualize Spots again, and Visualize Spots by the way, you can also turn on with your keyboard. You use the letter A, and if you ever forget the keyboard shortcut for things, just hover over something without clicking on it, and it'll tell you in the tool tip. So that's how I know for sure it's the letter A. I'll come in here and just retouch out where I can see these obvious circles. I think I have some smaller ones up here, and then once I'm done, since this is happening to all of the other images, I really need to inspect those other images, because who knows what's in the position where I'm doing my retouching in the other pictures. It could be that that's somebody's face in that position, and if so, it has to be very precise what information you end up copying from. So after I touch up this image, what I'm gonna end up doing is I'll turn off Auto Sync, so now what that means is whatever I do to this picture will not affect the others. Then I can switch to the other pictures and touch things up, whereas if Auto Sync was left on, if I changed one of the other pictures, it would affect all, and so I don't wanna do that. To go to the next image, I'll do command right arrow. Just like I did when I was cropping, and here I can see how some of these circles overlap in different areas of the picture, not just the blue sky. I can see one spot here that was rather obvious that I had missed, and then I just look at these areas, like this one and this one to see if it copied from an appropriate area, and if it did not, let's say right here I'm not liking the look of that, I click on it, and then I use that forward slash key to force it to look at a different area. There I got it to look better, and just double check that everything looks good. Look in these trees. Make sure it didn't copy from a rock instead of a tree, that type of thing. Then again, command right arrow to go to the next picture. And I put my mouse over the image. I see it's trying to retouch part of her foot out. So I just gotta decide was any sensor dust speck that was in that area worth it, because right now that distorts that area. I'll just hit the delete key to get rid of it, and it's not really an obvious sensor dust speck, when it's not on a blue sky, so I think it's okay to not retouch out that area. And I just look through the rest of the image to make sure that all these spots where it did its copying look appropriate. Yeah, and here again, it's going like right on the edge of the sidewalk. Now you should know that on each image though it made an independent decision of where to copy from, unless I manually dragged the source, it is deciding it independent, so in some of these I might need to click and either retouch out some additional spots, or reposition the spots that are there. Depending on if it picked an appropriate area to copy from. Forward slash to switch and force it to pick from a different area. Once I think it's good, then I usually turn Auto Sync back on, 'cause I want that to be kind of my default setting, so the next time I come into this tool, I make the assumption that it's turned on, 'cause that's where I usually like to end up. All that means is if I make an active change to this picture, it'll affect all the others, but it doesn't mean that it's suddenly gonna make these changes identical across them. It's only some active change I make. Like moving one of the sliders for adjustment or anything like that. I'll type the letter G to go back to the grid mode, and then let's start talking about some of the other features that were found in that spot healing, because so far here's how we've had it set up. Any time I'm getting rid of sensor dust spots, then I usually have my feather setting set to zero. That means use a hard-edged brush, so that Lightroom has control all the way out to the edge of the circle that I have. I also usually have a setting that's found near the top, set to Heal. Heal means blend in and perfectly match the brightness and color of the surroundings, but on occasion, I need to change my settings. If I set this to the setting called Clone, Clone means blatantly copy and do not adjust the brightness or color. So, if I wanna get rid of this branch that's here, and I use the choice called Heal, it might work, but it might not, because when you get to the edge of the document, it might decide to blend in with what used to be in that spot, and if so, I'm gonna get some dark edges. Well, there it decided to copy from down here. I'll hit the slash key to tell it to copy from somewhere else, and it did a fine job, but you'll find that on occasion, it will blend in with something that used to be on the edge of the photograph, and it'll remember that there was dark branches there, and it won't quite work. If that was the case, then I would need to change the setting of my brush from Heal to a choice called Clone, where I'm telling it not to blend in with the surroundings, and therefore, don't blend in with the color that used to be on the edge of the document. And when that's the case, I usually need to adjust my feathering setting. Since it doesn't do anything at all when you have it set to Clone, to attempt to match brightness and color, usually it's very easy to see where the edge of your brush finished, and so you need to turn up the feathering setting to have it fade out on the edge and that's where it will kind of manually blend in. So then I can come in here and retouch this. And as long as the area of the sky I copied from is the same brightness, it would work fine, but in this case, if you need to copy from the other side of the document, the brightness of that side of the document is different, so I can see this looks too dark. And so that's why the majority of the time when I'm using these tools, I'm using the setting called Heal. Because with Heal, it's gonna blend in with the surroundings, so if you watch this area, I'll set it to Heal, and it blends in, and anytime I use Heal, I almost always have the feathering turned all the way down, because that allows Lightroom to have control all the way out to the edge. If feathering is turned up too high, then you'll find that it can't perfectly match around that edge, 'cause you just have not given it control all the way out there. You can change the settings after you've already painted on the picture to define the area, as long as that dot is active. You can tell a dot is active, 'cause it has a little black pin in the middle, whereas this one is hollow. If I click on this, I could switch to work on it, if I wanted to fine tune it, and whichever one has that black dot in the middle is what you're controlling over here, so if you need to change from healing to cloning, you wanna first click on your picture. What happens is a lot of people when they're new to Lightroom, they'll retouch out one area, like over here where the branch was, and then they'll start thinking about retouching out something down in here, and they're thinking about their next step instead of the one that they're actively working on, and they come over here and say, well, I wanna clone, and I wanna turn up my feathering, and they don't realize that it's actively affecting the area they last worked on. So what you wanna do is before you start modifying those changes, when you're thinking about your next step, you need to first come out here and actually go across the area that needs to be changed, so you're actively working in that spot. Then you can come over here and fine tune the settings that would be appropriate for that. So you can see here how we can get rid of areas. We also have a setting called Opacity, that is here, and that's if you don't wanna completely remove something. Sometimes people will have something like a birthmark on their face, and they'll want me to do something to tone it down, so it's not quite as obvious, but since everybody that knows them knows they have that birthmark, it would look inappropriate to remove it. It wouldn't look like the same person. So, I'll end up completely retouching it out at first. Then I can lower the opacity to say don't completely make it disappear. Instead, just lessen the impact of it, and I could do that in this case to these two areas if I wanted to, and sometimes that's a nice thing to do if you want somebody's attention to not be directed to that area quite as strongly. So, anytime you use this tool, you can mouse over your image. You'll find these little pins to indicate all the areas where you have done your retouching. You can click on any pin to go back and revisit it. You can change the settings for that particular pin, and right now, I have it so those pins only show up when my mouse is within the image, and when I move off the image, they disappear. That's in the lower left area. It's called Tool Overlay, and I set it to Auto. And once you set it, it's gonna remember that setting. Also we have the Visualize Spots check box. Remember you can type the letter A to turn it on, and it is a really good thing to turn on, especially anytime you have large expanses of smooth sky, 'cause I can see here a few sensor dust specks that I otherwise wouldn't notice, and if I ever made a huge print of this particular image, I'll get rid of a bird that's right there, too, but if I ever made a huge print of this image, then I might notice those sensor dust spots, and I'd much rather notice them here by turning on Visualize Spots. Now here I'm not able to retouch this out, and I think that's because it's already used it as a source when it copied across the document, and that kind of locked it in. I might need to remove one of these, remove this thing, and then go back. And also they're actually, the real reason for that is that it's remembering the last settings I used. The last time I used this tool, down here at the bottom, remember I didn't completely remove these areas. Instead I was showing you we had a setting called Opacity, and it remembered the same setting for the next time I used it, so I always have to look over there, and anytime I end up using Opacity, I really gotta be careful, 'cause the next time I use the tool, it's gonna still remember that. So here I'll turn off Visualize Spots, and I'll go back and redo this area over here. I'll make sure it's set to Heal, and it didn't quite pick an appropriate spot, so I used the forward slash key, and on its second attempt, it does. All right, I think those are most of the settings that are in here. The only other thing we have that I really like is there's a little light switch down here near the bottom of this area, and that's just gonna temporarily disable what you've done, only with that particular tool, and therefore you can turn it off and back on again to kind of check your work. And see what'd it look like before and after, and if you really don't like what you did, there is a reset button here, which will get rid of all of those changes you've made with that particular tool, effectively acting like you never used it. Then to get out of this, just click on the tool a second time, and you'll be back to having access to the rest of your adjustments. So, we've looked at how to get rid of sensor dust specks. We also had to look at a setting called Auto Sync if we have more than one image selected. That's what allowed us to get the exact same areas that we're retouching to go across multiple pictures. All right, let's move on now to another feature, and it's called the Adjustment Brush. With the Adjustment Brush, I can paint an adjustment into our image, so instead of being limited to just moving sliders that might isolate things based on brightness or color, like you have in the normal adjustment sliders here, we're gonna just manually paint on an image. I have a bunch of images here where I've already done this, so I can show you kind of a before and after. Then I'll show you how the tool works. I'll press the letter D to go to Develop, and in this tool, I'm gonna go to the Adjustment Brush, the tool on the far right, and with that, to show you before and after, I'm just gonna go to the bottom of where all the settings are found for that tool. Just to make it so you can see all those settings, I'll collapse down my histogram here, just so it takes up less space. Then you can see further down towards the bottom of these adjustments, and if I keep going a little bit further, you'll find a little light switch right there. If I turn that off, you'll see what it looked like as if I never used that tool, and if I turn it back on, you'll see the difference. So you see some bright areas in the grass near the foreground, and those have been darkened, in the after version, and also these hedges that are here, I ended up brightening those to make them stand out more, and you can also see the skin tone on my wife here. She looked a little pale in that spot, and so I gave her a little tan, and I also brightened her face, but those are changes I couldn't make by just using the normal adjustment sliders in Lightroom, 'cause there's not an adjustment slider called Face, that would isolate the face from the rest of the image. Now when I hover over my image, you're gonna find these little pins, these circles, and those indicate all of the areas where I have applied an adjustment. If I hover over any of those pins, and I pause for a moment, it should show me an overlay. The overlay indicates where precisely I painted, so this pin is affecting all the areas covered in green. If I go to the next pin, and I hover over it, you'll find it's affecting a small area. Go to this one, and you'll see where it's affecting. Each one of these pins represents a different adjustment, which usually means I moved different sliders, so that one might be changing the saturation of an area. Another one might be changing the brightness. And so on. So this image has quite extensive adjustment to it, whereas many other images will only have one or two spots. Let's switch to a different picture just to get another idea of what kind of changes we might make. In this case, I'm gonna turn off the little light switch that's there, and you can see the before image. What happens with mixed lighting is any time there's an area lit by the sun, it'll be a warm light, because the color of the sun itself is orangish, yellowish kind of a sun, but then the areas that are in the shade will look blue, and that's because if you have a blue sky in your picture, the blueness of the sky is what's lighting the shady areas in your picture. So, in this case, I adjusted the color so the area where my wife, Karen, is, I thought looked good, but then this area in the background had a bluish feel, because it's being lit by the blue sky. If I turn on my adjustment brush, you can see that I warmed it up so that now the colors look a little bit more consistent, and so that would be another example. If I move my mouse on top of the image, you can see there's a total of two pins, and if I hover over those two pins, this is affecting that whole area where it had the cool light, and this is affecting just the sign. Let's see if I have another image here, and again, I'm gonna take that little light switch and I'm gonna turn it off, turn it back on again, and you can see how it allowed me to brighten up certain portions of the picture, and if I hover my mouse over the image, you can see how many different areas were adjusted. Hover over each pin to see how much of an area each affected. All right, now let's actually use this tool, figure out how we can go about making those adjustments and painting them in to our image, so I'm gonna go back to the first image that we used, go back into the Develop module by typing the letter D, and I'm gonna get rid of any adjustments that have already been made with that tool. To do so, I go to the adjustment brush, by just clicking on it, and I scroll down here near the bottom of all the choices related to the brush, and right next to that little light switch, just to the right of it, is the word Reset. And Reset will discard any changes that were used with that particular tool. So now when I hit reset, it'll look the same as me turning the little light switch off, and now I can paint things into my picture. Now, here we have a limited set of adjustment sliders, and these have the same names as what we have when we're adjusting the image as a whole. We just don't have every single slider that's available when we adjust the entire picture. We have a limited set of them here. If you were to move these sliders right now, you wouldn't see anything at all change within the picture, 'cause it doesn't yet know which area within the picture you want it to affect. So you could just wildly move these sliders, and the image will not change at all. All you're doing is your preloading the brush. You're guessing at what setting it might need, so when you start painting on your picture, you'll see it change in some way. Well, it remembers in here whatever settings I last preloaded into the brush, and if I want to start from zero, 'cause I have something dialed in here, there's a little trick. If you double click on any of these sliders, it will reset it to their default settings. So if I double click on the slider for saturation, you see it's currently at negative 37. When I double click it goes to zero. I could do that to each one of the sliders that is not in the center, or I can double click on the name of the section that I'm working on. In this case, it's called Effect, and if I double click right on that, it means reset all the sliders that are underneath it. And that's not just for our adjustment brush. It's for the normal kind of adjustments as well. Just see if there's any kind of a heading above, and double click on it. It will usually reset all the sliders associated with it. So that means my brush right now is not preloaded with anything. I look at my image, and I just guess. I say, well, I wanna brighten these hedges that are here, so I could do that by either increasing the exposure, or maybe bringing up the shadow slider. I could either do one, or possibly both, but I'm only guessing 'cause I can't see what it's actually going to do to my picture. Then down here at the bottom, we have settings for my brush, and most of the time, the default's to be on this little letter A. We'll talk about the difference between A and B in a few minutes, but these are the settings for my brush. I can choose how big my brush is by moving this. I can choose how soft the edge is with Feather, and I can choose how much of the adjustment I'm asking for do I get on my first paint stroke? Which means that I could, if I turned this down, build up an effect, by painting over an area multiple times. In this case, I'll leave that at 100 at the moment. And for now, I'm gonna turn off Auto Mask. We'll use that in a few minutes, so you'll get a sense for what it does. Now, changing the size and feathering, I don't usually do with these sliders. Instead, I usually have my mouse over my image, and I just use the scroll wheel on my mouse, or if I have a track pad, you use two fingers on the track pad, and you move up and down. That changes the size of your brush. To change how hard the edge is, you add shift, so shift and that is adjusting the feather setting. So I'll dial in what I think I like here, and now I'm gonna paint on my picture. Now remember, this is what I got loaded into my brush. The exposure's gonna go up a little bit, which should brighten the image, and the shadows is gonna get a little bit brighter, so I come over here and when I paint, I should see the area I paint over get brighter, but that's only because that's what I dialed in on the right side of my screen. Do the same thing over here. Might need a slightly smaller brush when I get to this area, to be precise. Get a smaller brush here. And since I'm applying this at 100%, it doesn't matter if I overlap that other area that I've already applied it to, because it's applying at full strength. It can't go any higher. After I'm done painting on my image like this, and in this case I might the, what would you call it? The trunk of each of these as well. Usually I'd zoom up a bit, so I make sure I'm precise about this, but for now, just for learning how to use it, I'm gonna be a little less precise than I would usually be, especially there. All right, afterwards, I think that went a little too far. It's too obvious that I brightened it, so now I can fine tune it, and whatever I do over here with the sliders will only affect that area where I painted, so you can see what happened if I move my exposure. Maybe I make it so it only goes up a tiny amount. I can adjust my shadows and see what would happen. And get it just the way I like. Maybe it's just a little bit too colorful. I'll bring that down. Then, if I wanna adjust a different area, I need to go up here to the top, just below where you see the adjustment brush, and you'll find two choices. There's edit, and that means when I move my mouse on top of my image, I'm further editing the area that I was working on previously, so I can add to it or take away from that, or if I choose New, it thinks that the area that I was just painting on I'm done with. And now if I move these sliders again, it will not affect my image at all, because it's thinking about my next spot I wanna work on. So in this case I'd like to darken these foreground areas where I see some light coming through, so again I'll double click on the word Effect to reset this, and I'll guess at what setting I think would be best in that area. I think bringing the highlight slider down about half way might be appropriate. Then I'll get a brush, maybe get a little bit softer edge, and I'm gonna see what happens now if I paint that in. See if I guessed correctly or not. After you get used to Lightroom quite a bit, you usually can be pretty good at guessing, but most of the time I end up fine tuning the end result, once I'm done painting it in. Now, if I find that certain areas in here are not quite as bright as the original areas that I painted on. There's some area like maybe right here, it's just the tiniest bit bright. It's nowhere near as bright as the others. That's when I might lower my flow, to say instead of getting 100% of what I've dialed in with those sliders, for this particular area, I only want around 30%, and I'll use that just there, so now we're getting 30% of the adjustment in that area. I try to remember to turn flow all the way up once again, so that, if I use the tool again, I'm not surprised. I end up with a full strength. Now I can fine tune these settings, 'cause it might not have been enough, or I might need to use a different slider to adjust that area, but I'm gonna get those nice and dark. And maybe I need to adjust my exposure as well. If I wanna see before and after, remember down at the bottom we have that little light switch. I'll turn it off, and turn it back on again, and that will show me what it looked like as if I never used these tools before, and what the results look like afterwards. Now, if I wanna adjust another area, and in this case I'm thinking about my wife's skin, and I wanna get her skin on the back area here to look more tan, so again, near the top right of my screen, I need to click on the word New, so that it thinks I should be done with the adjustment that I was just working on, and therefore I'm working on a new one. And what it's actually doing is if you hover over your picture, you know how you see these little pins that represent the areas that you've adjusted, well usually one of those pins will have a black dot in the middle. The black dot indicates what you're currently working on. When you click New, the black dot simply goes away, meaning you're not working on any of the pins that were already there, and therefore you're not going to be changing those. You can always go back and click on a pin. A little black dot will appear within it again, and whatever settings were being applied to that part of the image will be dialed in over here on the right side of my screen, and I can fine tune it. So here I'm refining that area, or if I wanna refine what I did over here, remember you hover over the dot to figure out where it's affecting your image, and you click on it to actually start working on that area again, and now I can fine tune these sliders again to work on that area. And you can also paint on your image to increase the area that that's affecting, or you can erase away parts of it as well, but if you see that little dot, that dot will go away the moment I click the word New. So if I hover over my image again, now none of those dots is active. So if I wanna work on my wife's skin, I could guess at the settings that I wanna use, but I don't really know in this case what I'd like to do, so what I'm gonna do is just double click on the word Effect, to zero out all the settings, and this time when I paint on my image, the problem is if I just paint right now, I'm not gonna see any visual change in the image at all, because all these sliders are zeroed out. So an alternative you could do is you know how when I hovered over these pins, It would show me that overlay? Well you can turn on that overlay so it stays there. For instance, if I click this pin, to make it active, it's only while I'm hovering over it that that overlay appears. But down here in the lower left, there's a check box, and it just says, Show Selected Mask Overlay. When I hover over a pin, it's the equivalent to turning this on temporarily. If you want it to stay on all you need to do is come down here and actually click that check box, or you can type the letter O for Overlay, and that can be useful, because now I can kind of evaluate this and say, hey, I think I see a gap right there, where I didn't get my paint all the way in there. I think I see another one right there, and I could fine tune this. Or if I think I painted in too large of an area, there's an area near the bottom here where I choose my brush size, and it's called Erase. Now, when I end up painting, instead of adding to the areas being adjusted, I'm gonna take away from them. We haven't talked about Auto Mask yet, so I'm gonna turn that off, but now I can come in here and say, well, I think I got too much over spray over here. Yeah, right there, it went a little bit above. So all I did is I clicked on an existing pin to tell it which area that I wanted to work on. Then, at the bottom of my screen there's that check box that leaves the overlay visible. You can also type the letter O to turn it on, and that's how I could tell exactly where this stuff is applying. To remove instead of add to it, I went down here near the bottom of these settings, and I chose Erase. If I need to go back to adding to it, I just click here on either the letter A or B. And I think in this case there's a trunk right here that I didn't get. There we go. When you no longer wanna see that overlay, just turn off the check box down here, or type the letter O, 'cause it toggles your overlay. All right, well I'm gonna create a new adjustment, so I'll click the word New, so we're no longer working on any of the previous ones. You'll find the sliders change to whatever you last preloaded, and that means whatever settings were in here before you clicked on your picture. So in this case, I wanna work on my wife's skin. I'm not sure what setting I wanna use, so I'm not gonna dial anything in ahead of time, but if I start painting on my picture, I won't see any change at all, so it'll be next to impossible to tell what have I isolated, so I'm gonna turn on the check box at the bottom before I even start painting. I'll do it by typing the letter O for overlay. You can see the check box is turned on, so now at least when I paint, I'm gonna see that colored overlay to indicate where I'm working on the image. I'll move my mouse over my wife's skin, and right now, if I paint on that area, you'll see it's way too big of an area that I've affected, so I'll choose Undo with command Z, or going up here to Undo, and this is when I wanna use a setting near the bottom called Auto Mask. Auto Mask, when I turn it on, is gonna make it so when I put my brush on top of the image, you'll find in the center of my brush is a little cross hair, and that little cross hair I need to put on the color that I want to affect, and when I click, it looks at the color that's only in the very center of that cross hair, and it says, only get paint on stuff of that color. And whenever you hit something that is a different color than what's underneath the cross hair, don't put anything down. So when I clicked on the skin tone, it covered the skin tone. Once it saw the green or black areas in the surrounding, it didn't put anything down, because it's not similar to what's underneath the cross hair. Now that didn't get all of her skin. If I actually zoom up in there, to zoom up, I'm gonna do, there's a couple different ways of zooming up, but one is space bar and the command key, and then you click. You see how it didn't get into the dark shadow area on my wife's skin? And that's for one of two reasons. The first reason could be that my brush wasn't big enough, and it simply did not cover up that area. Or the second thing could be that that area was considered to be different enough in color that it wasn't considered to be the same color as what's underneath the cross hair. So I can come in here, and zoom in and out if I want to. I find there's a little weirdness with this, in that now it thinks I wanna zoom instead of use the tool that I was in, and so oftentimes I need to switch out of the tool and back in, in order to think that I'm working on the tool instead of trying to zoom. But when I went here, most likely it just thought that that was too different than the other skin tone. So I'm gonna click on here again, and I'm just gonna drag, and I'm watching the cross hair, and I'm letting the cross hair hit her skin, and see if I can get it to affect that area, but then that area of her skin in there didn't have all that much color to it. It was much closer to being black, so it thought the surrounding area was similar enough, so it affected that. To get rid of that, in the lower right I choose Erase, and I could try using Auto Mask with Erase, and now it's going to think about what's in the center of my brush, and say, only erase things that are similar in color to that, and let's see if I can get over there. I just am gonna make it so my brush doesn't overlap her skin much. And do that. Let's see if the color of her pants could be separated. I mean, if I blatantly overlap the skin, you can see that it is preventing it from getting into the skin. But you just have to be careful. There's no need for blatant overlap of that brush onto her skin, so I'm just gonna get it overlap a tiny amount and hope that Auto Mask prevents any over spray onto the skin. I might get a smaller brush when I get into this tight area, and I'll just probably say that's good enough. So you can see how Auto Mask can be useful to really isolate an area without having to be all that precise with your painting. I'll zoom out of my image again, and now, I'm gonna turn off the overlay. I'll do that by typing letter O for overlay, and now I can dial in whatever change that I want. Maybe what I need to do is bring my highlights down to darken the skin a little bit, maybe bring the saturation up to make it more colorful in there, and if her skin needs to be a little bit more yellowish, I'll adjust the white balance, the temperature and tint, and just push it over here towards yellow. See, I'll go too far just so you get an idea of what it's doing, and then I'll try to dial it in with subtlety. And sometimes I might need to move this towards magenta, just not too far. So now if I turn off that light switch at the bottom, watch her skin. Before, it looks kind of pale in there. After, you see how it's much more, it's got a nice skin tone in it. So again, up here I choose New, and this time, I wanna end up affecting her face, and with the face, you would have to get in there really tight and if I zoom up on this, to do that with the brush, and make it only my work that isolates her face and no automated help, that's not gonna be fun, so this is again where I'm gonna use Auto Mask, so I'll turn on my overlay, 'cause I'm not sure what settings are good for her face. Make sure Auto Mask is turned on, and I make sure the little cross hair in the center of my brush touches skin, doesn't touch the background, doesn't touch the green that's here or her hair, and I'll click, and I'll see if I can isolate just her face. It did an okay job. I'll hit Erase in the lower right to get rid of a little bit of over spray, and maybe I come over here and get it off the background. I still have Auto Mask turned on, 'cause it'll help to not blatantly remove from her skin, and here I see an area, touch that up. I might end up getting a much softer-edged brush, and that's what I'll use when I go over her hair to remove, just so if it stops removing, it's not abrupt. And it doesn't have to look perfect here. Nobody else is ever gonna see your mask. I'm gonna turn off Auto Mask here, and I'll bring my feathering way down, so I have a relatively hard-edged brush, and I'll just touch it up right there beyond her neck. Then I might manually add some areas back. I'll click on the letter A. A simply means a brush that adds to things, and depends on if I think Auto Mask will be helpful or not. In this case, I'll turn it off, 'cause I'm just gonna manually do this. Get a nice small brush, and I might come in here and get her ear, and that little part of her neck that it missed, and the top little portion of ear. All right, but I did an okay job there, isolating this area. I could be more precise, sure. But is anybody else gonna notice? Is the question, and I'll only know that afterwards, when I turn the little light switch on and off, to see before and after with my adjustment. But if I wanted to, I could choose Erase, and I see an area just beyond her nose and right there, I could touch up. But like I say, nobody else will see this overlay, so who knows if they'd notice. I'll turn off the overlay, and I'll decide, what should I do to the face. Well, what I'd like to do is brighten it, so I'll bring the shadow slider up a little bit. Anytime you brighten an area that was formerly dark, you're gonna find that usually there's gonna be noise in it, 'cause noise is lurking in the dark portion of the image, so I might need to come in here to the noise slider. When you bring it up, it doesn't increase the amount of noise. Instead, it's noise reduction. I just didn't have enough space, to put the word reduction in, so I'll bring that up, and I might need to adjust my white balance, maybe making her a little bit more towards magenta, or a little less magenta, maybe a little bit more towards yellow, or less. And finally maybe adjust my saturation. Let's see what we did to her face. I'll turn off the little light switch here to turn off all our adjustments. There's before, there's after. So you get the sense for how this is working. Now, you should be aware that down here we do have the choice of A and B brushes. And all that is is so you could switch between different settings. Maybe you load up A as being a hard-edged brush that is small, for touching up little bitty areas, and then you could load up B as being a large, soft-edged brush, and clicking between the two just quickly changes the settings for your brush. It's no different than moving the four sliders in the check box that is found down here at the bottom. So if I set up A maybe as my primary brush, it's got a big brush. It's got a relatively feathered edge, and it's got Auto Mask turned on. 'Cause that's what I use for usually my primary brushing. Then for B, I make the size much smaller. I make my feathering much less. I have Auto Mask turned off, because that's when I'm gonna come in and touch up little areas that I missed with the first one. And then all I'm doing is clicking between A and B here, whenever I wanna change my settings. It's just a shortcut. You could totally ignore the letter B, and simply move the sliders instead. But that's all these are, is just to be able to quickly switch between the two settings when you're painting onto your image. The other thing you can do in this area is there's a little triangle, and if you click there, it will reduce down all the settings so they're not quite, they're just not cluttery, and now you can just change the size of your brush, and it looks a little more simple and easy, even though those other settings are still there. They're just being simplified by collapsing down that area. Now if you look at the settings that are in here, these are many of the same settings that we would have to apply to the entire picture, and one thing that I will often do is I will counteract something I've done to the entire picture, so that sometimes with the whole picture, I end up bringing the highlights way down to darken up the highlights so my blue sky doesn't get almost white. Instead, it's got a nice density to it, and so do other areas. But in doing so, certain areas might start looking dull, like the bright areas on skin might suddenly look quite a bit darker. Well, so to counteract that, I'll look at what is the highlight slider set to that's being applied to the entire picture. You know, the highlight slider, when I am not using this tool. Instead, if I get out of the tool, the one right here. See my highlights is at negative 100? Right there? That's what's being applied to the entire picture. Well, I wanna counteract that somewhere else within the image, so I grab my adjustment brush, and I set highlights to positive 100. Therefore, when I paint within my image, I'm actually bringing the highlights where I paint to zero, because we already have negative applied to the entire picture. And I'm now telling it to change what the picture has to increase it by 100. Well, if it's already got negative 100, and I'm saying increase by a hundred, that increases it back to where it started at zero. And so I can kind of counteract things. The same can be true if you're sharpening a picture. Under the Detail tab in Lightroom. Well, it might look great to sharpen a landscape, but if there's a person standing within it, sharpening their face the same amount that you're sharpening trees and mountains in the background is probably gonna exaggerate all the little wrinkles in their face, so you might end up looking at the sharpening setting that's being applied to the entire picture. Let's say it's at plus 30, and you take this sharpness slider and set it to minus 30, just to counteract, and to say, wherever I paint with this particular tool, let's put no sharpening in, because we're bringing it down the same amount that's being applied to the entire image. We're just using a negative amount of that. So that's one thing that I also use the adjustment brush for. Let's see if there's anything else in here. There is. There's a choice in here called Moiré. If you ever have a picture of somebody that has fabric on, and you find the fabric's got this really weird pattern that looks like you took, I don't know if you've ever seen this, but if you take two screens like you'd find on a screen door in your house, and you put them on top of each other, and then you rotate 'em, you get this really weird pattern. It's called the Moiré pattern. Well, I don't have an example image here, but if I ever got that, I would use this slider called Moiré. I'd turn it up, and I'd paint on the guy's shirt, and you would see that effect most likely go away. But I think we've covered the majority of things that are in here. I wanna get down to a feature that was recently added, though, and that's down here at the bottom, and it's called Range Mask. So let's find another image. Oh, and actually I can show you that with a different tool, because Range Mask is available not just in the adjustment brush. It's also available on the next two sets of tools we're gonna use. So, let's glance at a few other images, and then we'll switch tools. So here all I'm gonna do is grab my adjustment brush. I'm gonna click within this picture, just so you can see the settings that were used in various areas, so here remember how that area used to be bluish? Well, if I click on it, look at what was done in here. The main thing that was changed was the temperature slider was moved away from blue, and therefore it absorbed some of that blue and made it look a little bit more yellowish. The shadows were brightened just a little bit, and the whites, which means the highlights, were brightened up a little bit. And the saturation was turned down, so it wasn't quite as colorful in that area. When it comes to the sign that's over here, that's where we got the other adjustment, if I click on that, the main thing that was done to the sign is it was made more blue, less yellow. If I get rid of that dot, all I need to do is click on it and hit the delete key, you'll see that there's just some warmth to that sign, and it made it so my eye was drawn to the sign more than I wanted it to be, so I painted on the sign, and I shifted it away from yellow, 'cause it was a little bit too yellow for my tastes. In this image, if I hover over, you can see all the adjustment points. Click on each one, and just look at the sliders, and you can see what each one is doing. And hover over each one to see which area it's affecting. So it's really nice to be able to revisit your images, and remember exactly what you did, and you can also fine tune any of these areas because all you need to do is click and as long as that little black dot appears on one of the pins, then that's what you've loaded in over here, and that's what you're fine tuning. All right, let's look at other ways that we can affect isolated areas within a picture. In this image, you notice the bottom portion of the image just feels a little bit darker than the rest? And I wanna be able to change that. Well, I could use my adjustment brush. I would most likely get a really big brush with a really soft edge, and I could paint across the bottom portion of the image, and dial something in. The only problem with doing so is sometimes you need something that is really consistent and even, and painting with the brush it's too easy to have one side affected a little more than the other, like I painted a little higher on one side than the other, so we have another tool, and it is in our little tools here the one that looks like a rectangle, and it's called the Graduated Filter. You can access it with the keyboard if you want, by typing the letter M, and with that tool, this image has already been adjusted. I can tell that because I grabbed the tool, and the moment I moved near my image, I saw a pin. Well, if I hover over that pin, we'll see which portion of the image is being affected, and you see how it's that bottom portion. If I click on the pin, I can see what changes were being applied to the image, and I can see that the whites were brought up, blacks were brought down, and so on. Well, I'm gonna get rid of that pin by just hitting the delete key, so we can see what it looked like beforehand. This is more of the original picture before the adjustment, and then that bottom portion feels much more obviously dark compared to the rest of the image, so here's what I'm gonna do. I want an adjustment that starts at the very bottom of my picture. I want the adjustment to be at full strength until we get up to right about here. Then I want it to slowly fade out, and I want it to completely stop affecting the image by the time we get to here. In order to do that, I click wherever I want the full strength area to stop. I want it to start fading out right about here, so I've just clicked there. Then I drag, and I'm gonna let go wherever I want the effect to completely stop. I'm gonna say by the time I get to about here I want it to completely stop. Then, I gotta be careful with where I'm positioned because it's gonna affect the angle, so if I want it to be perfectly straight, I could hold shift down, and that'll usually snap it to being perfectly horizontal or vertical, and I can go there. The middle line is the halfway point where we're fading out, and now if I hover over that pin, it will show me how it would affect the image and how it would end up fading out. After doing so, all I need to do is go to the right side of my screen now and dial in the adjustment that I think I'd like to use. If you find that when you do that that these lines remain on your picture, that's because in the lower left, there's a setting in the default, I believe is Always, which would always show that overlay, I find that the be distracting when I'm adjusting the picture, so I change it to Auto, and Auto means whenever I move my mouse onto the adjustment sliders, that little overlay would disappear. So let's see what I could do here. I'll bring my whites up. That means make the brightest portion even brighter, and then I might bring my shadows up, but I want that area to still have kind of a silhouette kind of a look, and maybe I wanna make that area a little bit warmer, so up here I'll push this away from blue and towards yellow, and you can see how I can get a nice little warm feeling down there, and I can experiment with other things, my contrast. Maybe I need to lower it in this case. Once you get used to these sliders, it becomes more obvious what needs to be done to affect areas, but oftentimes you're just experimenting until you get a good look. Now at the bottom, there is a check box there, just that on/off switch. I can see before, what it looks like without the tool, turn it back on and there's after. I can also adjust things. If I come over here, I can grab this and pull that bottom edge. Remember the bottom line represents where does it start fading out? Below that, it'll apply it full strength. Above this line, it will apply nothing whatsoever. The middle line is halfway through the fade out, and you can fine tune it, by just grabbing these and pulling. To say, well, I want full strength to go all the way up to there, and maybe I'll let it fade out further into the sky, just to see what it looks like. If you want to completely move it, you can click on the middle dot, and that just moves the whole thing. When I'm done, I just click on the tools icon again, or I type the letter M a second time to toggle out of it, and if I wanna get back to my grid of images, I type letter G to go back to grid, or I can click on the word Library. I actually wanna move a few of these images to a different spot, so I can get to them when I use a different tool, and let's go to two other images. Here's another image, and this one I believe already has had the graduated filter applied. I can find out by clicking on the tool, going on top of the image, and seeing if a pin appears. And if I hover over the pin, it will show me which portion of the image is being affected. If I click on the pin, I'm going to load up the settings on the right side of my screen for what actually was being done there, and as long as I'm near my image, I'll see exactly where it stops doing the full strength adjustment, which is right here, and where it completely stops affecting the image, right there. If I wanna see before and after, I have the light switch. I'll turn it off and back on again, and you can see that the bottom portion of the image was looking a little dark, so I brightened it up. What did I end up doing to brighten it up? I brought up the shadow slider as high as it was go, and when that wasn't enough, I started bringing up other sliders like my whites slider, which affects the absolute brightest part of the image, to bring some of the highlights in there, and fine tuned some of the other sliders. But here's what it looked like before. There's what it looked like after. Then we got one other image which is this one. Again I go to that tool. I hover over my picture, and I see one pin. I hover my mouse over the pin, and it shows me exactly which portion of the image is being affected. If I click on the pin, I would see the lines. This line in this case indicates where it is affecting it full strength, meaning anything above this. This is where it stopped affecting the image, so the only difference between this and the previous ones is the direction in which I dragged. Wherever you first click is where full strength stops. So I started clicking here at the top of the image, and I dragged down, 'cause wherever you let go is where it completely stops affecting the image. So what did I end up doing in this particular case? Well, I clicked on that, and I don't see any of the sliders with any settings, so I go down here to the bottom, and I turn the light switch off, though, I can see a change in the image, so what's going on there? Well, you're not limited to just using adjustment sliders. We also have a choice down here at the bottom called Color, and there's a little rectangle to the right of it, and if you click on that, you can choose a color to force into your picture. So here I'll change it to green, and now you see the top of the image has green, or I'll go over here to red, and what I did in this particular case is I think I just put in a little hint of blue or purple at the top of the sky, 'cause I wanted to kind of enclose what we were working on there. If I turn off the light switch before, you can see the sky goes kind of purple at the top, whereas afterwards, it is more of a blue. So the adjustment sliders that we have available in here are the same as when we used the adjustment brush, so those I don't really need to explain any further, I don't think, because we've already been using them, but one thing that's nice about, when you use the graduated filter, something that's unique, is, remember before we had the choice of Edit to edit something that's already existing, or we ended up having the choice of New, but we have an additional choice up here called Brush. It wouldn't really be needed on this image. Let's see if I might be able to find one where it would be appropriate. Let's say that I had this image, or this image, either one. I'll try this one. I'll go and go to my Develop module. In this case, do you see this area of the sky that looks gray? I think my exposure was such that my camera just didn't pick up the detail, and this I probably have the highlights turned all the way down, which is the only thing causing this to have any detail at all. If I had brought my highlights and left them where they were, you see that was kind of a blown out area of the sky. Well, I'd like to push some blue into that. So let's go to our graduated filter, and I could preload it. I just click on that little square that's there, next to the word Color, and here's my color picker. I could choose a blue, or if you wanna get tricky, you can't move out here to choose from the sky directly. It just makes that color picker go away, but if you start by clicking in here, and you keep your mouse button held down, then you can go out here and pick a color out of your image. So maybe I choose the blue that's right up in here. I had to start clicking in here, and not let go. I just drag on top of the image, so I've loaded up the color I want. Now, I'm gonna tell it to apply it full strength up to about here, and then I'm gonna have it fade out where it completely stops out about there. So that means I'm gonna click right about here, to say full strength from here on, and then I'm gonna drag this way diagonally in this case to say stop right about there, so in this case it's everything down in this corner that's getting full strength, and it's getting less and less, until it gets to there. Well the problem with that, and maybe I'll dial in a few other settings. I'll see if I can bring my highlights even further down, see if I can maybe bring the exposure even further down to darken that, and maybe adjust my saturation, but the problem is it's affecting the building and the palm trees. So that's when, in the upper right here, I'm gonna choose the choice called Brush, and now, what that's gonna allow me to do is either brush in the adjustment, or take it away. So if there was an area that needed more of that, and it wasn't where it needed a gradient, I could just choose the A or B brush down here at the bottom, but in this case what I really wanna do is take it away, so I'll use Erase, and I'm also gonna turn on Auto Mask. All right, let's see what happens now. When I grab my brush, I'm gonna go right on top of this palm tree. I'm gonna click and I'm gonna drag, and you should see the adjustment being removed from the palm tree. I'll go over to the building that's here. I'll click, and we're removing the adjustment. I have Auto Mask turned on, and since the color of this building is quite a bit different than the color of the sky, I can let the brush overlap the sky relatively freely, because the Auto Mask is what's preventing it from taking away from the sky. Gotta make sure I get in these windows here. And this is where I might wanna turn on that overlay, so I can tell where else is it affecting things. I can turn on the check box at the bottom, or type the letter O, and you can see that it's still applying to parts of the building over here, so I might paint there to get rid of it. Still applying over there. Touch this stuff up. I can see it over there. I didn't even notice that. And then let's try to do our palm tree. Now when I'm doing this, I'm being extremely careful at where the center of my brush is, 'cause that's where the cross hair is that Auto Mask uses to figure out what should it paint on, so I can get a huge brush like this, and it's not that I'm being uncareful. It's I'm watching where the center of my brush is, and I'm not clicking right now until the center is touching that palm frond that's there, and then I just click. And then I don't click again until I get it perfectly on top of something else that is the appropriate color. And if it ever messes up and deletes from the sky, I'll choose Undo, and I'll try a different area. But you can see how I can get a pretty complex mask here to isolate an area by combining the graduated filter with this choice called Brush that allows me to remove from where it's affecting the image. How did I do it? Well, I used the graduated filter. I clicked and dragged on my picture to find the area I'd like to work on, and after doing so, I ended up going near the top, right up here, and that's where I found the choice called Brush, and if I clicked on Brush, then down here, I have my normal brush settings. And that's where I chose to erase, and I used Auto Mask. If Auto Mask wasn't on, then I'd have to have a much smaller brush, and I'd have to be really precise along the edges of all that stuff, but Auto Mask is really what made this easy. You could also go in and choose A. Maybe turn Auto Mask off. I don't think I need this right now, but if I wanted to just add this in, I could say hey, apply it here too. Choose Undo, I just type command Z, for Undo, control Z in Windows, 'cause that really isn't appropriate here. All right, then afterwards, I'm gonna turn off that overlay, and now let's turn off light switch, see what we've done to the image. First, look in the lower right of the image and notice that it doesn't really feel all that gray anymore. It feels more blue, so when I turn this off though you'll be reminded of how gray it used to be. If I think that's too much of a change, I'm thinking that in the actual corner it's pretty good, but once you get out to this area right here, it's a bit overdone. So let's touch it up. That's when I tell it to use the brush, so I gotta make sure I'm on the brush area. I'm not gonna do Auto Mask, because I already got it off the trees and things. I just want blatant painting, and I'm just gonna make sure I have an extremely soft-edged brush that's humongous. The bigger the brush is, the softer the edge is. And then if I wanna remove it from that area, in this case I don't wanna completely remove it. Instead, I'm gonna bring down this setting called Flow, and that means how much do I wanna remove? And I'm gonna remove 25% of what's been applied, so now here goes. I'm just gonna paint like this, and as I paint in this area, well actually, I got one thing messed up. I'll choose Undo. I wasn't on Erase. I was on A, and A means blatantly painted in, blatantly add this adjustment to the image. Need to be over there on Erase. Then I can dial in a big, soft-edged brush, turn off Auto Mask, turn my flow down. I didn't realize I wasn't erasing. Okay, now let's try it. I'll click on my image, and I'm just gonna paint right through here to try to lessen that. I'll let go, and if I paint again, I might be able to build up a little bit more removing that from the image, just so it's been lessened. If I were to look at my overlay, you might notice it, although it'd be a little bit hard to tell. It might be a little bit lighter in that area. Let's see if I paint it here, if you can notice. I'll bring up my flow higher to make it more obvious. Do you see the green getting lighter there? I don't think I needed to remove quite that much. I just wanted to make sure it was visually obvious that it was working. So I'll choose Undo, and I'll actually dial in what I think I need. It was a subtle change. So I'm just trying to lessen it, right there. All right, I'll turn off my overlay, and I could experiment more with the settings that are here, but I think I did a pretty darn good job at getting that corner of the image to be more blue, and I think that's a really sophisticated adjustment because if I hover over the pin, look at the mask that's there. It slowly fades out across an area, yet it also very precisely conforms to the edges of trees and buildings and things, so that's kind of pushing Lightroom where you can really see what it's capable of. Now that's the graduated filter, and with the graduated filter, there are other ways that I could approach this. Let's see if I could have done that in a faster way. What I'm gonna do is I'm gonna redo this. I'm gonna go onto my image. I'll click that pin to make sure it's active, and I'll just hit delete to remove the adjustment. Then I'm gonna just redo it. I'll say apply at full strength to here. I'll drag out to about there to say that's where I want it to stop. I'll let go. And then I'll just make a visually obvious change to the image. We already got the color dialed in. I'm gonna bring my highlights down, and maybe I'll bring the exposure down. I'm just gonna make it really blatantly obvious. That's not what I actually need in the picture. I just wanna show you how could I get it off of the trees using a different method? And if we don't have a visually obvious, it won't be obvious when it's off of them. All right, and a newer feature in Lightroom, it's down here. It's called Range Mask. This is available not just with this tool. It's available I believe with your adjustment brush, with this particular tool, and with the next tool we'll cover. So know that it's not exclusive to this one, but Range Mask, if I click there, I can have it isolate things either based on color, or based on luminance. luminance is just a fancy word for brightness. And if I choose luminance, now what we have here is something called Range, and if I adjust this, you can see that it's gonna remove it from the sky if I bring this in, or if I move in the opposite side eventually it will remove it from the trees and possibly the building. What's it doing? Well, if you actually look closely at this area, it means only affect the brightness range that is found between these two sliders. And therefore, do not affect anything that's in this brightness range over here. So when you look at the image, the sky was really, really bright. The palm trees and the building are much darker in comparison, so by moving this over, I can get it so I can most likely get it off of the building and that tree. Then there's a choice called Smoothness, which controls the transition. You know, what's happening in the edge, where it's fading out? Should it be abrupt, or should it be more a little bit soft? So I could dial that in just right, and then I'd probably fine tune my settings I have here, 'cause I didn't need my highlights down or my exposure quite that far, so now we're just fine tuning what we've done, but it's largely not applying to the tree anymore. And if I hover over the pin, you can see that the color overlay does not overlap the tree all that much, and there's just a hint of it in the building, so it can be a much faster way of isolating things. That was a setting called Range Mask. I set it to a choice called Luminance, which simply means brightness, and then these sliders say, only apply within this brightness range right here, and then you fine tune this to try to get the transition to look good. All right, we got one other tool we need to talk about, and that is one that allows us to brighten or darken our picture, but instead of going in a straight line like we did with the tool we last used, this one's gonna radiate out from the center. So I'm gonna choose an image and go to the Develop module, and I believe this image already has it applied, so let's go to the next tool. It's the one just to the left of the adjustment brush, and if I hover over my picture, I can see if there's a pin on it, just like with the other tools. If there's a pin, it means that particular tool has already been used. If I hover over the pin, it will show me which area within the picture is being affected, and you see it's the area on the outside portion of the picture. It's affecting the majority of the image, affecting it less and less as it gets right here into the middle. If I click on the pin, it will make it active, and it will load in the settings, and we can see exactly what was being done to the picture. And there's a little on/off switch at the bottom. If we turn it off, I can see what it looked like without, and what it looks like with. And you can see it's darkening the vast majority of the picture, but not darkening where those people are seated, so how do you do that? How did I add this, and how can I control it? Well, I'll get rid of this one. Anytime the little pin in the middle is black, that means it's what you're working on, and if you hit the delete key, you'll remove it, and so if I were to just open a picture, and go to the tool that I'm currently in, so the tool just to the left of the adjustment brush, I could click within my picture, like I'll click right here, and I can drag to define the shape, and I can make it wide or tall or round. If I hold shift, it should make it round, but in this case, I wanted their legs in there too. Then if you wanna reposition it, grab the pin itself and pull on it like that, and if you wanna fine tune it, you can always grab these little points on the edge to fine tune like this, and I think if you wanna get fancy and pull just one side, you can hold down the option key, alt in Windows, so therefore usually without option it pulls the top and bottom at the same time. With option, it would only pull one of those pins. So I define the area that I want, and this tool has something preloaded into it. Do you see the color down there is set to blue? That's why the image is turning blue. I'm gonna double click on the word Color to reset that. Double clicking on any one of these is going to reset it to default. All right, then if I hover over the pin, it shows me the area that would be changed within the picture, but do you notice how soft that transition is? And how much it extends in towards the guys? Well, I can change that at the bottom. There's a choice here called Feather. I'm gonna make it so that overlay stays there. That's the check box at the bottom, or you can type the letter O for overlay, and now if I adjust my feathering, I can see it, so I can make it softer, or I can make it more abrupt. I might have it somewhere in about like that. I'll type the letter O to turn off the overlay, and now I'll darken the rest of the image. I'll say, bring the highlights down, so the bright portion of the image, not as bright. Maybe bring the exposure down. There we go, darken that up. Heck, maybe make the whole image other than them a little bit less colorful, so they stand out a little. So, you can see how we can easily do that. Now, when we did this though, it defaulted to applying to the area that was outside. If I go to that pin, I can click on it, if I actually right click on it, there's a choice called Duplicate, and so therefore we're gonna have two identical ones of these right on top of each other, and then I'm gonna go on the right side of my screen, and you'll see a check box called Invert. Invert means apply it to the opposite area. So right now if it was applying to the outer area, when I choose Invert, it's gonna switch to looking at the inner. So I choose Invert. If I hover over the pin now, you can see that the inside area is instead highlighted, and I don't want the same adjustment for there, so I'm gonna reset all these adjustments. I don't know if you remember or not, you can double click on the heading at the very top to reset 'em all. So for where the guys are, maybe I'll make the brightest portion of the image, the absolute brightest, a little bit brighter. Maybe I'll bring up something called Clarity, which will make it feel a little bit sharper in there, and sometimes maybe I'll adjust something like Contrast, maybe lower it a little bit, make it easier to see what's there, but I'm trying not to make it that obvious. But what allowed me to adjust the center instead of the outer edge was this little check box called Invert. Invert means give it the opposite side with that, so this is something you could use to replace another feature in Lightroom. That feature would be, if I get out of this tool, and I go down to an area called Effects, there's something called Post Crop Vignetting. What Post Crop Vignetting does is it usually darkens the edge of your picture. Well, the problem with that is it always does it based on where the edges of your picture are, and therefore it's the very center of your picture that remains brighter, and your subject isn't always centered. In this case, they're in the lower left, and if I were to use vignetting, it would have ended up darkening this image, but in a centered way, where the central portion would be the brightest, and here I need an offset. I need it down and to the left a bit. And so instead, I used the Radial filter to do so. Now you can use it for all sorts of other things. Let's say for instance here I have a lamp sitting there, and I want it to look like that lamp is, the light falls off much more quickly than it does here. That lamp is really lighting up this space because the light walls make that happen. Well, with this tool, let's click and drag right where the lamp is, drag out like this to define an area, and then let's hover over the pin to see how much of the image would change. You see, it's the hall that's that whole outer area. Maybe I'll expand this out a little bit, and what I'm gonna do is just darken up the outer area, either bring exposure down or maybe bring down highlights. But now I can make it feel as if that lamp is fading out much more quickly. Maybe I want the lamp itself to feel like it's more yellowish light, just in this spot. Well, in this case, if I hover over, this is affecting the outer area. I want the opposite of that, but I don't wanna get rid of what I have, so I right click on the pin, and I say Duplicate. That gives me an identical pin, and I say Invert, down here at the bottom, to make it only affect the center, and then I need a different adjustment, so I reset all my adjustments. That means double clicking on the word Effect, just like we did before, and now I'll push that towards yellow, so maybe bring up the saturation, make it more colorful, whatever it is I wanna do, but I'm affecting two areas. I got the outer area getting darkened. I got the inner area shifting towards yellow. Maybe I bring the contrast up or down, or Clarity, and I can fine tune it. If you wanna see before and after, we have that light switch. Quite a bit different. One last one here. You see where the sun is. Well, maybe I want the sun to feel warmer, so I again go to that tool, I click right where the sun is, I drag out however far I wanna go, and it still has the previous settings preloaded. If you find you get annoyed by that, 'cause it seems to always be preloaded, well, then what's happening is you're trying to reset these after you've already clicked on your picture, so get rid of whatever you're applying to your image, so you have none of that, and it's only before you click on the image that you determine what's preloaded, and I can see that blue color in there, so I'll double click on the word Effect, before I click on my picture. Now nothing is preloaded. Then I'll come over here, apply this, way out to there, hover over the dot. Right now, it affects the outer portion. That's not where I want to affect. I want the inner, so I choose Invert. I wanna see how much it fades out, so I turn on the overlay, and I adjust feathering. Say how much should that fade? Turn off my overlay, and now let's make it feel warmer where the sun is. Maybe make it more colorful where the sun is. And I could make the highlights brighter or darker, where the sun is. And turn off the light switch, before and after. Now if I for some reason didn't like that it is affecting the tree that's there, that's when you go to Range Mask. We used Luminance before, and I could say, only affect the bright portions, don't get into that tree. Do you see the tree changing? All I'm doing is bringing in the left side, 'cause whatever's in between these two halves is what it can affect brightness wise, and I can make it so it doesn't affect the tree. The other choice you have in here we haven't used is called Color. Let's say I didn't like the green grass changing, or I wanted to only change it. If I choose Color, then I can grab this little eye dropper, and if I click on an area, then I can tell it exactly what should it affect. Should it only affect this yellow sign? Should it only affect this green grass? And so you click on the color you want it to change, and then over here the amount slider means how much should it deviate from that? And the similar colors. So in this case, we're saying, only affect things that are yellowish. 'Cause that's where I clicked within the picture. So that can be useful. If you have a blue sky, and you want it to only affect the blue sky, then you do an adjustment, you choose, and you set Range Mask to Color, and you click on the blue sky. Fine tune this slider until you've isolated the sky. So when it comes to working on isolated areas of your picture, we had a bunch of choices. First, we can just crop things out that we don't like. Second, if we have sensor dust specks or other small areas that are an issue, we could use a spot healing brush to try to remove them. But if what we really needed to do is adjust just an isolated area, we have three choices of what to use. One is the adjustment brush. That's where I can just blatantly paint on our image. The second is the graduated filter, which is where you can go across a straight area where you can say apply full strength here, and fade out as you go across this area. The third was the radial filter, and that radiates out from a center, with both the graduated and radiated, you also have the option of touching it up using a brush. I didn't show you that when we had the radiated version, but it works just the same as it did when I worked on the image where I added blue to the lower right, and later on, I took it off the building, and I took it off the tree with a brush. Well you can do the same thing when you're using that radial filter as well. I just didn't happen to have an image where I needed that. So with those tools, we can do quite sophisticated adjustments using Lightroom, and we're not limited to working with sliders that affect the whole image. We can dial in exactly which portion of the image we need to change. Know that if you purchase the class, part of the extras you get with purchase is homework. And in this case, your homework is a custom Lightroom catalog where you have a bunch of challenge images within it, where you need to use these various tools to try to improve the pictures and fix problems. So it's a really nice way to practice where you have images pre set up for you that is really the best way to learn the tools. Now we still have 12 days left. That means we still need to talk about things like noise reduction, sharpening, high dynamic range, panoramas. We'll talk about advanced adjustments. If you thought this was advanced, we'll go much further than that. We'll also get into trouble shooting, so if something goes wrong in Lightroom, you might know how to get around it. Tomorrow, we're gonna talk about reducing noise, sharpening, and correcting for any kind of lens distortion, like a fish eye effect, or if you tilted your camera up, and the top of the building looks smaller than the bottom. That's what we'll get into tomorrow, but before then, why don't you head over to Facebook. We have a private Facebook group, and if you join that group, you could ask questions, and other people that are watching the course can end up helping to answer those questions, but I also come in there, and I'll do a Q and A, where I pick my questions from the Facebook group. If you purchase the class, you should be aware there are a whole bunch of extras. First off, you can pause and replay these videos as many times as you want, any time of day you want. You also get pdf companion workbooks, where for each day, it reminds you of what we covered on that day, so you don't have to always play back the video to be able to reproduce things. It really saves a lot of time with that. You also get a lot of things like develop presets, so you can make it faster and easier to apply adjustments, and a whole bunch of other additions. If you wanna find me on the web, here are my various websites, both my main website, and on social media, and this has been Lightroom Classic: the Complete Guide. I hope to see you tomorrow.