How to Use Graduated + Radial Filters in Lightroom

today I'm going to show you how to use graduated and radial filters in Lightroom [Music] hey guys and welcome to phlearn my name is Aaron NACE and you can find me on phlearn comm where we make learning fun and in today's episode I'm going to show you how to use a graduated filter as well as a radio filter in Lightroom now these are incredibly powerful tools and they really come in handy when you want to edit specific parts of your photo we're going to show you how to use both of these filters to make a dramatic difference in your images guys we've got a great episode let's go ahead and jump into Lightroom so here's our image for today and we're going to be editing different parts of this image using our different filters now you can actually download this exact image on phlearn comm just follow the link in the description right down below so right now we're in our library module and this is mostly used for organization and filtering things like that of your photos now to edit the photos here in Lightroom I'm going to go to the develop module there we go and here on the very top you're going to see your basic adjustments here's where we can adjust things like our exposure and/or white balance highlights and shadows things like that now you're going to notice as I move my slider it's affecting my entire image which can be sometimes really helpful but let's say I don't want my entire image to get brighter or darker I just want to choose specific areas of my photo well that's where our graduated filters come in so before we start adding our graduated filters I'm going to go here on the left hand sidebar and create a snapshot so let's hit this plus icon okay and we'll just call this before there we go so we have a snapshot for the before that way if I want to come back to this at any point in time I just click here and it's going to give me our how the image started out okay so our graduated and radial filters are located right up here on the top right sidebar here in the develop module so let's go ahead and click first on our graduated filter so clicking on there you can see basically we have a nice drop down here that it's like basically gives us the controls just like we have here in our basic adjustments but now they're only going to be affecting a certain part of our image so let's just as a little test here I'm going to click and drag from the top down and you're going to see it's going to start to darken the top of my image now the reason it's doing that is keep this is where your controls are so just keep in mind if you click here on your graduated filter the controls order right here so the reason it's darkening down this area is because right now the exposure is set to negative but I can click there and bring it up and it's going to brighten the exposure in that area okay let's go ahead and write it up and we'll show you how the radio there's the graduated filter actually works so if I hover over it for just a minute you can see what areas are actually affected now I can click here and drag this up and down okay and basically on one side it's going to have our exposure settings that we have we hit set it and on the other side it's going to be transparent okay and the line here between this line and that line that dictates how smooth your transition is going to be for instance if I have it just this light let's go bring our exposure up even more so you get an idea here so if we have these two lines very close together you can see we have a very harsh transition I click on the bottom line and bring it out a little bit more you're going to see your transitions going to be a lot smoother now you can also rotate this so moving our cursor to the right-hand side here I can simply click and rotate this around so we have basically different areas of highlights now in this case keep in mind I have my exposure brought all the way up to a +4 that's why it's getting so bright but you don't have to choose exposure here you have access to all of these tools like your clarity and your saturation and sharpness and things like that ok so let's go ahead and rotate this back around there we go that looks pretty good and we'll go ahead and bring our exposure back down again now let's say we want to just delete this guy ok because it's it looks good but that's actually not the change that I want to make so all you have to do is click on there and hit the Delete key on your keyboard and it's going to delete just that filter because you can use multiple filters at the same time so let's jump in and show you how to do that so in this case I actually do want to add a couple of filters because the right side of the image is super dark and the left side is a bit dark as well so let's grab a graduated filter here I'm going to click and drag from the left just like this ok now by default it's bringing my exposure down so I'm just going to exposure up just a little bit and we're going to bring our saturation down on that side which is going to help draw more attention to the center area where we have some more color we'll do the same thing on our right hand side so this graduated filter is good to go to add another simply click and drag from the other side here there we are and in this case I'm just going to bring our exposure up just a little bit more and let's spread that out so it actually reaches our subject alright and we can bring our saturation up a little bit now in this case you can see the black levels here are not as dark as I would like it this did help you can see it did help brighten up my background but the black levels here that there's like a little bit of like yellow in them so I'm going to go ahead and take my black levels and just bring that to the left okay and now we have our black levels where we want but we can still see this area is getting brightened significantly all the things like that in the background so we've used a couple of different graduated filters together to both brighten up the left side and the right side of our image now let's go ahead and jump into a radial filter which we can use for just to Center the image around our subject so to get to your radial filter it's right next to our graduated filter so he's our graduated filter let's click on that it's going to close it down and click on our radial filter and we're going to open up our radial filter now really just the same way to use this click and drag out from the center ok in this side instead of using a graduated like from one side to another it's going to do this in a radial manner now you can see in this case it's actually our setting here is to bring the exposure way down okay which kind of does look cool but that's obviously not what we want the case right here is it's bringing the exposure down outside of my circle right like as I bring the exposure up or down this is happening outside of the circle so what we can do here is right at the very bottom you can invert this mask so instead of bringing the exposure down here in the center or sorry instead of bringing the exposure down on the outside it's going to affect this center so this basically says are you going to affect the outside of your circle or the inside okay so now that it's affecting the inside of our circle we don't want to bring our exposure down that doesn't look - good let's go ahead and bring our exposure up just a little bit okay we can alter this radio filter simply click on the middle and you can click and drag and move it around okay you can click here on the bottom and stretch it out a little bit there we go and you can adjust your feathering so for instance if we wanted a harder edge we can have it be a hard edge which in this case doesn't look realistic at all so I hope you don't do that or we can bring our feathering up giving it a softer edge making the effect a little bit more subtle okay now in this case let's go ahead and start adjusting this towel we want because I can affect the lighting in this area of the photo which i think is really cool so let's go ahead and bring our highlight level down just a little bit I'm going to bring my shadow level up so what we're doing is kind of evening out the exposure on our subject all right we can bring our exposure up just a little bit and I'm going to bring the contrast level down and we'll bring our saturation up that's just going to give us like those really nice green there we go that looks really nice alright now in this case I brought the saturation up but it's really it's kind of too saturated on my subject so we're just going to bring that back down a little bit there we go and we'll do another radial filter for just our saturation okay so I think this looks pretty great let's bring our clarity up just a little bit that's going to help draw attention to our subject okay we're going to create another snapshot there we go and we're going to call this radial and hit enter so here we have our before so this is our image before we did any adjustments and this is after our graduated and our radial adjustment so you can see this is incredibly powerful and you can use these tools to affect certain parts of your photos now we're going to add one more radial filter we'll use that to increase the saturation of our image and then I'm going to paint out just our subjects faith jumping back in here let's grab our radial filter now if I click on my radial filter and hover over my image you're going to see my other filters so I can always click on this other radio filter and move it at any time okay but in this case let's go ahead and click here off and then back on and we can create a new radial filter so I'm going to click here in the middle and drag out just like this now this one basically I just want to affect maybe saturation and a little bit of color temperature okay so again we need to hit the invert mask button okay let's bring our exposure down to zero and I'm going to make our temperature just a little bit warmer there we are and I'm going to bring our saturation up that's going to help draw attention to the center of our photo now in this case we can see that our subject skin really doesn't look that good and the reason is is because we're adding saturation see it looks way better there we're adding saturation and warmth to this whole area but it's also affecting our subjects skin so we can actually mask this radial filter which is really really very actually really helpful so let's click here on our brush tool where it says mask you can click on brush there we go and then hold it it's got a little plus icon you can see here in the dark it's got a plus icon which would add to our mask or if I hold alt or option it's going to subtract from our mask which is helpful so let's hold alt or option here and I'm going to simply paint on our subject and what this is basically doing is it's telling this radial filter to not be visible where I'm painting there we go so we're going to have a much more natural color on our subject alright and you have your controls here for your brushes right down here on the bottom maybe add a little bit more color back into his hair and just a little bit here alright let's bring our flow down a little bit just subtracting a little bit of color out of our subject okay so there we have it if I hover right over here we can see we have a radial filter but you can see the mask now is not including parts of our subject especially his neck and things like that where it was just a little bit too colorful okay well that looks great so let's go ahead and create one more snapshot I'll just call this final okay and that's including this is including a graduated filter from the left well from the right and two radio filters here in the center well that's basically how we use our graduated and radio filters in Lightroom let's go ahead and take a look at her before and after so here's our image before and after our graduated and radial filters so you guys can see what a huge difference this can make in your photo and it's extremely easy to use in Lightroom so if you want to do this on your own photos just follow these steps first import your photo and navigate to the develop module in Lightroom next open up the right-hand sidebar in the develop module and click on your graduated filter icon click and drag on your image and you'll notice the controls automatically appear on the right hand side you can move a graduated filter by clicking and dragging on the center point you can also rotate it around the center line and you can change the feathering using the external lines in the graduated filter to use a radial filter simply click on the icon right next to the graduated filter and here you can choose to invert your map affecting only the area inside of the radial filter you're going to have access to all the same tools you did in the graduated filter and you're going to have the ability to add a mask so you can either add or subtract from certain areas of your graduated or radial filters thanks so much for watching guys I hope today's episode helped out and don't forget you can download this image just follow the link in the description write down below thanks so much for watching and i'll phlearn you later bye everyone [Music] Oh [Laughter] [Music] [Music]

Channel: PHLEARN

Views: 116,195

Keywords: Phlearn, Photography, Aaron Nace, Photoshop, Adobe, Tutorial, Help, Tips, How-to, Education, Adobe Photoshop, Class, Course, Learn Photoshop, lightroom, graduated, radial, radial filter, editing, graduated filter, adobe photoshop lightroom (software), lightroom 5, adobe lightroom, lightroom tutorial, lightroom radial filter, lightroom 6, lightroom radial filter tutorial, lightroom graduated filter tutorial, lightroom tutorials, lightroom editing, photo editing, tutorials, photoshop tutorial

Id: z6OEdxlR8_U

Length: 13min 24sec (804 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 06 2017