Lessons
Lesson Info
Tools Overview
When you are using Lightroom for portraits, there are a couple tools that are really important for you to use. The first is gonna be Q. I use a lot of keyboard shortcuts. Q is going to be the keyboard shortcut for your Spot Removal Tool. The Spot Removal Tool is this tool right up here. Okay? If I click that you can see that this Spot Removal Tool has two different settings. You've got your Clone setting, and you've also got your Heal setting. The next, I don't wanna go into too much detail right now because I will go back to that in a minute. The next is gonna be K, K is what I'm gonna be focusing most of today's class on. K is our Adjustment Brush. You can do so many different things with the Adjustment Brush. That's what I'm gonna focus on most. Especially when retouching portraits and that kind of thing, you've got an iris, and you need that iris to have specific changes applied to it, so we're gonna use that Adjustment Brush for that. The nice thing about this brush is, if you'd l...
ike it to have a long handle, ya you just do that. If you want your brush to have a short handle, you just close it back up. I don't know why that does that, but it's just like (laughs) your handle on your brush. Whatever. If you want to switch between your Brush A and Brush B, you can just quickly hit your forward slash key, which is gonna switch between Brush A and Brush B. For me, most of the time, my Brush A is about a medium size, can you see this, lemme zoom in a little bit down here on the bottom. My Mousepose is coming up whenever I hit something on the keyboard, because I use my keyboard so much, I like to show you what key I'm hitting on my keyboard. That's that pink line that you see showing up in the bottom. Anyway, so Brush A is usually a very soft brush, with 100% feather, fairly large, and about a medium percent flow. Then my other brush is like my detail brush. I usually keep that at a very low size almost .1 pixel in diameter. This should be set to zero feather, and a fairly high flow. So depending on what I'm working on. If I'm working on eyeliner, I may use a brush like this. If I'm working on blush, which needs to be soft and feathery, then I would use Brush A. You can easily switch between those two brushes using the forward slash. All right, what else? Option or Alt, if you've kind of taken your Adjustment Brush and painted too much, and you need to erase some of that, using your Option or Alt key is going to switch you over to your Erase tool. Can you, well you can't see, because of the because of the bar. But when I hit Option or Alt, that Erase shows up, okay? Or activates. How many people, okay hide, H is for hiding your pinpoints. When you have a bunch of adjustments that you've added to your image, you're gonna have a lot of those pinpoints show up all over the image, and sometimes they can get really annoying. So if you just hit your H key, you can hide those very easily. Okay, so here's my question. How many of you have been using the Adjustment Brush and go, why is it red? Why is this showing up red all over my image? That's not what I wanna do for the Adjustment Brush. If you've had that happen, that is your brush overlay. I'll show this in just a minute. But your brush, when you paint with it, let's see, when you paint with you brush, I'm making my brush smaller using the bracket key. So let's just paint an area like that. If I hit my O key, can you see the mask overlay? O is for overlay. So I'm basically, it's showing me where the effect is being applied and where it isn't applied. So a lot of times I'll get a, I don't know why but my brush is just painting red over my image and I don't understand why it is. It's because you have activated your mask overlay. So if you'd like to not see the mask overlay, you hit the O key, and that will take the mask overlay away. Now if you want to change the color of your mask overlay, you can hold down shift, and really screw with your friends using Lightroom, because you can change it to neon green and they'll be like, what's wrong, why is everything really green on my screen. So, hitting delete is going to delete that activated pin. So let's go back to our helpful little tools overview here. So Shift+O will change the color of your overlay. Bracket keys are going to change your brush size quickly. Shift plus the bracket key is going to change the brush feather. So if I've got my brush here that I'm using, and I hold down Shift plus the bracket keys, can you see that feather slider here? I know it's under pink. So that feather slider right there, is going to change back and forth, depending on which way with that bracket key I'm moving. Okay? You can also hee the brush, the change in the brush itself. You can see that feather radius contracts and expands. Okay. I think I'm almost done. Just as in Photoshop, your number keys are going to immediately access different amounts of flow for your brush. So think about flow in Lightroom the same as brush opacity in Photoshop. If you are brushing with, K for Adjustment Brush. If you are brushing with something, and you want to decrease the amount of flow, hitting 3 is gonna take you to 30%. Hitting 5 is gonna take you to 50%. Hitting 9 is gonna take you to 90% of that brush. So it's just simple, really easy things. You should maximize the use of your keyboard when you're retouching, because they're right there. And you don't have to take the time to move your cursor over here to really focus and then use those sliders. I really don't like doing that. Just takes too much time. Is that everything? Oh, and if you want to check the before and after of your global changes, of everything that you've applied to you image, that's going to be your backslash key. If you want to just check a specific before and after of just the Adjustment Brushes or just the tonal curve, there is a small, light switch looking thing right down here, and if you turn this light switch on and off, you're gonna see just the before and the after of turning that off, not everything that's been done to the image.
Class Materials
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Ratings and Reviews
Cheryl Jones Schindler
This is an excellent class. I have covered over half of BenWilmore's complete guide to Lightroom, which I needed as I have mostly played around with the obvious sliders in Lightroom until now. So fortunately I had a little familiarity with brushes. This is so helpful for me to now use what I learned with more detail and more skills specifically for portraits of my family. I am so excited to use all this! Thanks!!!! She is an excellent teacher.
Lesa Wright
I very much appreciated Kristina's energy and concise instruction. She was very easy to follow and remained focused on each lesson without being repetitive or random. I learned great time saving tips that will not be difficult to implement. Thank you, Kristina!
Stacey Feasel
This was a fantastic, easy to follow course! So glad I took it!!!
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Adobe Lightroom