How To Use The Adjustment Brush In Lightroom | LR Classic Tutorial

this video is sponsored by skillshare an online learning community with thousands of inspiring classes for creatives what's so good in their infinite wisdom adobe have been gradually improving the adjustment brush tool with every major version of lightroom and they've just made one extra improvement to it in the last version as well and i'm really stoked to see how far they've come with it a lot of people don't know the true potential of the adjustment brush tool and what it can do for your images so in today's video i'm going to show you guys all the different ways you can use the adjustment brush tool to take your photos to the next level so with the adjustment brush we're going to start with the two most important keyboard shortcuts that you should know the first one is the k key on the keyboard if you press k you'll get a brand new adjustment brush and you'll see that on the right hand side we've got this brand new window here with all of our options we can control exposure white balance contrast and a bunch of other stuff as well but if we come down to the bottom here we've got our brush controls so you've got a and b which means you can select two different brush sizes with different parameters we've got the size which is pretty straightforward so that'll just adjust the size you can also scroll up and down if you've got a mouse and that will change the size of your brush we've also got the feather so that's going to control how quickly uh or how soft the brush is and how quickly it's going to fall off on the edges and then we've also got the flow flow is the opacity of the brush so adding multiple clicks over the same area with a lower flow will help you to build on that opacity then we've got the density so think of the density as the upper limit of the opacity of that brush so if you only ever wanted to cap the opacity of a brush at 80 or 50 percent or sometimes even lower that's where you would set that value i've got mine set to 100 right now now the second shortcut is the o key and that's going to show our overlay so if i make a selection here now i'm just clicking on the screen and i press the o key that's going to bring up the selection so this is what i've just selected as you can see here in red now if i make any changes it's not going to show up there it's only going to show it's only going to show where that effect is being applied once i hit the o key again and then make a change now you can see the adjustment is being made so the overlay is a really nice guide when you're creating selections to see exactly what you're doing and what parts of the image you're going to be affecting one of the most common ways i use an adjustment brush is to do some subtle skin softening especially when i'm shooting portraits so we've got a beautiful shot of our model cat and what i'm going to do is i'm going to zoom in one to two another little tip here is if you hold the space bar down you can move the canvas around which is really handy while you're making your selections and what i'm going to do here is press the o key to bring up our overlay once again so that we can see what we're doing and i'm just going to be brushing over her skin so as you can see here i'm going to be making a fairly rough adjustment it doesn't have to be perfect and i'm actually going to avoid her eyes the details of her nose her eyebrows as well as her lips so i'm just gonna go ahead and i'll be changing the size of the brush as we go you guys can see my settings on the right hand side i've got the feather at 100 and the flow at 100 and then i'm just varying the size of this brush as i go around as i need so just making a fairly quick adjustment here for the sake of this video and what i can actually do if i accidentally brush over a part of the image that i didn't want to select is just hold the option key or alt if you're using windows and that's going to bring up another brush and as you can see on the right hand side now it has selected the erase brush and you can also edit the size feather and flow of this brush as well so i'm going to just scroll and adjust the size of this brush and still holding the alt or option key i'm going to brush in and as you can see that's getting rid of my selection so that's a really handy tool if you ever brush over accidentally an edge or you just need to clean some stuff up so if i should do a really messy job around her cheek here i can come in and i can cut back that area and then clean it up so that's really handy i've done a really quick and dirty selection here i'm going to press o again to get rid of my overlay and now i'm going to come over into the right hand side and this is usually what i do you guys can totally play around with all these different options and see what works for you but i like using the texture slider in the later versions of lightroom they added this texture slider so if we just bring that down to around negative 50. obviously this will change depending on how drastic you want that skin softening to be and if we come down here to this little on off toggle button in the bottom left hand corner we can turn it off and then on again as you can see that softened up the skin but it hasn't taken away sharpness from any of the features of cat's face another powerful feature is using adjustment brush presets so if i wanted to create a preset out of this brush all i would do is make my changes so i'm going to take the texture down once again to negative 50 and i'm also going to reduce the contrast a little bit as well so maybe negative 10. then i'm going to come up to this little option here that says custom and i'm going to save the current settings as a new preset so now i can call that skin softening and hit create and now i've got a preset brush that i can use again next time i need to do some skin softening next up i'm going to show you guys one way i would use the adjustment brush on a landscape image and i'm going to show you guys how to use auto mask i'm going to hit the k key to create a brand new adjustment brush and then i'm going to hit o which is going to show our overlay and by holding the a key on the keyboard we're going to switch on our auto mask and this is going to create an automatic mask lightroom is going to work its magic and try to figure out what we're trying to select and it's going to do it based off that little circle with the cross hair in the middle of the adjustment brush so what i'm going to do while still holding the a key is come along here and i'm going to be selecting the sky and then once we get down here towards the horizon i'm going to make my brush a little bit smaller and i'm going to do a series of clicks along the horizon here and i'm going to make sure that the cross hair doesn't actually go below the horizon and as you can see lightroom has done a pretty good job of only selecting the sky in this image with the auto mask if we just hit the o key again now we can start making some slight adjustments so i'm just going to bring the exposure of the sky down and as you can see the sky is really popping out now you don't want to go too crazy with this as it can start looking a little bit too fake i also want to make the sky look a little bit more blue in this photo i think so now i'm going to show you guys how to use the range mask in combination with the adjustment brush so i've got a really nice photo of my friend matt here who's posing in between these two mountains and we've already made some edits to this photo and i've got a new adjustment brush ready to go here so i've increased the size of my adjustment brush and i'm actually going to brush over most of the image here and i'm just going to stop just above the horizon as you can see there's like a little bit bleeding over but that won't matter for this and what we're going to do is come down to this option right at the bottom of our adjustment brush menu where it says range mask now you're going to want to click on this and select luminance what we want to do here is only select parts of the image that are of a certain brightness and that's where this luminance selection comes in so if we notice down here in the panel now we've got range and smoothness now in this range slider the left hand side is going to represent our shadows and the right hand side is going to represent our highlights just like a histogram so if we pull up the left hand side of this slider you'll begin to see that the darker parts of this image the selection is going to go away it's going to become deselected and we're only going to be selecting the highlights in this image so as you can see there's barely any selection over matte now and also there's none over the water and also the rocks at the bottom of this image now we can hit the o key and what we can do is bring the exposure down and as you can see that's added a lot of moodiness into the sky and we've brought back a lot of that detail in the clouds and the fog there and i think this just brings a new element of drama to the photo we can also add a little bit of dehaze in there to add a little bit more drama as well and the most important thing is that this adjustment brush is not going to affect any of our shadows so it's not going to affect the bottom half of our image which is already really dark we don't want to make that any darker than it is and we just want to bring out the drama in that sky so now i'm going to show you guys another way to use the range mask and it's not luminance this time instead we're going to use the color option so we've got another photo of our friend matt here and we're going to hit the k key to create a new adjustment brush and then the o key once again so that we can see our overlay now i'm going to start brushing in over his red sweater here so if i just make a pretty rough selection i don't really have to be precise as we're going to be using the range mask to refine our selection and now if we come over once again to our range mask and then we go to color we get this little eyedropper so what we're going to do with the eyedropper is just click on it and then we're going to bring it over onto our image and you can draw a square anywhere on the image to select the range of colors so if i just draw a nice big box here on matt's chest that's going to pick up all of the colors from his sweater and then that's going to refine the selection so that it only selects those colors now that we've refined our selection you can see that it's kind of hard to see the overlay because it's red and matte sweater is also red but there's a little trick here to fix this so if we press shift o we can actually change the color of our overlay so we can accurately see what we're doing so that's really cool as well now i can come up to this hue adjustment and i can make slight changes and as you can see we're changing the color of matte sweater we can also adjust the saturation so make it a little bit less bright or we can make it brighter if we want to with the adjustment brush and the color range mask you can really start manipulating the colors in your image one last thing if you guys come up here to this inverted triangle in the top right hand corner of the adjustment brush menu and click on this it's going to collapse that menu and now we have this amount slider and this is going to control all of the sliders in your adjustment overall and it's going to affect the overall strength of the adjustment that you just made so if you make a selection and then continue editing your photo then at the end you think the adjustments that i made are a little bit too strong you can come back in and dial them back i wanted to show you guys one more example of the auto mask and sort of my strategy on how i get the best results i've got a new adjustment brush here and when i hold down the a key we're going to bring up the auto mask now when you drag the adjustment brush across the image you'll see that it doesn't do the best job of masking out that edge now if i just delete that adjustment brush here and i just do individual clicks and keeping in mind that the area that's going to be selected is under the cross hair in the middle of the adjustment brush not going into those clouds and just doing these individual clicks really helps to keep that selection nice and clean so i found that individual clicks works a little bit better than simply dragging the brush over the image and if i hit the o key and then pull back this sky and maybe make it a little bit more blue you can see that that's a pretty clean selection so i would recommend doing the individual click strategy when you're trying to get a really refined edge selection with the auto mask so i hope you guys enjoyed the video and you learned something from it i personally love learning new things especially when it comes to photo and video editing if you're anything like me and have an unrelenting thirst for knowledge when it comes to anything creative then skillshare is one of the best resources you could have at your disposal skillshare classes are curated specifically for learning meaning that there are no ads and they're always launching new premium classes so you can stay focused and follow wherever your creativity takes you i've teamed up with skillshare to give you guys a really exciting offer the first 1000 people who click the link in my description will get a free trial of skillshare premium so once again i hope you guys enjoyed the video hit the subscribe button if you want to see more videos like this and leave a like down below if this helped you out in any way thanks guys for watching and i'll see you in the next one [Music] you

Channel: Mitch Lally

Views: 13,141

Keywords: lightroom adjustment brush, tutorial lightroom adjustment brush, tutorial adjustment brush, lightroom adjustment brush tutorial, lightroom, Lightroom adjustment brush tutorial, automasking, lightroom tutorial, what is the adjustment brush, how to use the adjustment brush in lightroom, how to use the adjustment brush, how to use adjustment brush, adjustment brush tips, lightroom classic, lightroom classic tips

Id: D0oLHfqDZYQ

Length: 13min 18sec (798 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 16 2020