Lightroom Brush Tips You NEED to Know

why everybody this is Mack Laskowski welcome to this video where we are gonna take a look at the adjustment brush and some tips and tricks inside of Lightroom and Photoshop is camera RAW because the brush is basically the same in both now this video it's kind of a celebration free bonus video for my upcoming course no light no problem it launches on Thursday August 9th at 12 p.m. and for 5 days there will be a massive discount and an exclusive bonus that you can only get so you can just stay tuned right here or just hit my home page up at mat kay calm and there's a place to sign up for my email list I'll make sure I let you know when the course is out but in the meantime let's get to the tips well the first thing that I wanted to point out is we're gonna start with the adjustment brush over here inside of Lightroom it's in the developed module in the top right corner and if you're using Camera Raw so if you've opened up a photo into Photoshop and you're using the Camera Raw dialog box here is that little brush that you'll see right up there okay everything I'm about to show you works exactly the same you'll find settings down here as you scroll down that right-hand panel so just keep in mind there might be some that you can't see there but everything that you're about to see here works exactly the same between the two okay first thing so let's say we are using the brush tool and I want to brush a little bit of I want to brush and I always that I wouldn't even count this as one of the things but I always double click the word effect to reset all the sliders and then I'll just just what I want so let's say I want to brush some exposure on to these little houses over here well yeah I'll go ahead and I'll start brushing and I have the overlay turned on let's turn that off for now I'll go ahead and I'll start brushing and make them brighter inevitably I want to brush up here toward the roof and what we have is a setting called Auto mask and you might have seen this before but I bet you you haven't heard the little tip I'm gonna share with it is that auto mask will help us kind of go along those edges there it'll it'll keep me from having to to zoom way way into my photo and use a small brush to painstakingly go across those edges sometimes you need that but sometimes I can get away with being a little bit faster about it well what we can do is rather than always coming down here and turning on auto mask I can paint and I can paint in the spots that don't need auto mask cuz auto auto mask it gets splotchy when you paint it and if you keep it on all the time number one it looks a little blotchy number two it takes longer to render as you brush so I like to get the big stuff done without it as I get near an edge if I hold down my command key on the Mac or the ctrl key on a PC it automatically turns Auto mask on all right so I have it and as long as you keep that little middle crosshair over your subject even though the brush is bigger it's not gonna go outside of that brush there and I know something happened because I can always come down here and I can always turn on the overlay there's a little checkbox there or you can just hit the letter O for overlay and turn the overlay on but just to show you what's happening here let's do this I'm gonna keep the overlay on and I'm gonna zoom into the photo just a little bit here and let's paint and I'm gonna paint and you're in a watch even though that crosshair doesn't go outside of the boundary of the house but the brush does see how there's a glow all right so so it's reaching beyond there because I didn't turn auto mask on but let's delete that and now I'm gonna hold down that command or ctrl key and I'm gonna brush again I'm keeping the commander control key down and I'm keeping that little crosshair and you'll notice for the most part it is not going outside those boundaries notice I said for the most part do not expect perfection all right it's especially because it's such a dark edge behind there there's not a lot of contrast if I did it up here I'm pretty sure I would get pretty close to perfection right up there alright because there's a really contrast the edge so light one can find it there's not a lot of contrast there so for most cases this works just fine if you need absolute perfection that would probably be a time to jump over into Photoshop but whenever I'm relighting something I'm always kind of bouncing in and out of auto mask mode because I don't want it on when I don't need it but when I do need it it's really easy to just press command or control and turn it on when I get around those edges okay number two number two before that so one of the reasons of this video is is to kind of celebrate the launch of one of the most fun courses I've created it's called no light no problem it's really meant for a very creative course for those times when we get out shooting we don't want it we don't want bad camera technique we always want to try to get in a writing camera but there's times where the weather and the light just don't cooperate if you don't have unlimited time and funds and money to go back and keep reshooting until it does there are things we can do inside a Lightroom and Photoshop to make that light better this is how I relate my photos four four times like that so you can go find out more Matt Kade comm slash light as well as download this video and you're gonna see there's some little presets for free at the end of it too okay so number two number two it's another one that sneaks by a lot of people is let's say go to the graduated filter I know we're talking about the brush but let's say it go to the graduated filter and I reduced my highlights and my exposure a little bit and I want to want to darken that sky up there okay I'm gonna turn on the overload overlay for now again you can just press the letter O is a keyboard shortcut so I want to go up there and I want to darken the sky a lot of times I'll use the exposure to do but more times than not I'll actually use highlights because highlights will keep me from kind of infringing upon this area but there are times where I really need to bring it down and I'll use exposure to well you'll notice what happens when I turn it on and off see how it kind of creeps over into the trees and starts to make the trees look darker and this would happen if I did it in camera two right graduated and D filter is still gonna darken the trees but by doing it here inside of Lightroom not only can I move this around I can go to the brush option all right and this is what sneaks by a lot of people is because they're actually you'll see it says new new as if I wanted to go and create a whole nother new graduated filter edit is editing the existing one to make it brighter or darker but if I click on brush it's actually different than this brush up here it works the same but it's letting me brush on or brush off part of this graduated filter so right now it's in plus mode so what I'd have to do is if I was in plus mode you can see it's just gonna make everything darker cuz I'm adding the way to think of it as I'm adding to the graduated filter here but if I hold down my option or Alt key it goes into minus or subtract mode okay you could also just click on erase down here which puts you into that same mode and then this is where you can go take a take a little trick from number one is our tip number one we'll just turn on auto mask and then I can go over here and I can brush along that edge and I can remove it from the parts of the photo that I don't want it to be on which is pretty cool all right now let's share some YouTube we're gonna go back into this Auto mask feature because one of the ways that I use auto mask let's turn on our overlay right now see see what I meant about the splotchiness as we zoom in to what we have over here you'll see it does it does get splotchy sometimes and it misses little parts and it actually takes longer so it's it's more processing power so one of the things that I'll do is once I get pretty close alright once I think I'm as close as I really need to be alright I'll go ahead and I'll turn auto mask off and then I'll paint the rest of it alright and this is really important when you're relighting your photos this is gonna happen this brush tool is gonna be one of your key tools for relighting and adding light to photos where it kind of fell flat so I know a lot of times I'll use the overlay - painting you can see I've got the oh-oh key pressed here that's off and that's on but I'll use that to paint into so I can really see if I missed any spots but my my main point with this whole one is outline the hard part first with your auto mask turned on okay go through and do the hard work and I know there's a little bit left over there will never ever see it outline that hard part first and then go in turn it off and then go get the big stuff go get the rest of it because again it doesn't matter you know it's it you don't want oh you don't want auto mass turned on inside of these parts because it actually makes it harder to work with so kind of goes back to that first tip of being able to turn it on and off a little bit faster as well but don't forget when you're using that graduated filter if we turn that overlay on you'll see now it's just going in the sky and then the same thing let's go ahead and let's delete the graduated filter and let's go to the radial filter same thing happens if I do something with a radial filter I get the brush up here again of an essential tool because sometimes you're gonna use the radial sometimes you're gonna use the graduated filter but you don't want the exact shape that it is and you really can't change it from linear or circle but what you can do is use the brush to go in and subtract from parts of where that filter affected okay tip number three tip number three is a really simple one but mando I use this a lot and that is there are brush presets these are the free presets that come inside a light room there bist just basically shortcuts to the settings inside of here and you can see I've made a bunch of my own brush presets here and I've actually got three of them that you can download on the page where this video is hosted so you can just head to Matt kay comm slash light but what you can do is you can change your settings to let's maybe increase the exposure the highlights maybe a little bit of a little bit of temperature on there I've actually got one in fact that I call sunshine and now I've got my brush and then I can start to paint sunshine wait okay I use this all the time gives me just a quick way rather than having to go through and change these settings every time I kind of have the settings that I know have worked for me in the past and it gives me a good starting place I can always increase it or decrease it or even add some clarity to it or something if I wanted to but there are presets there so these are my presets of course I do have a few of them for you to download and if you head down to the bottom you will see it says save current settings as new preset so you can make your settings whatever you want inside of here and then go down here and just choose save current settings as new preset it's gonna pop open a little dialog box just give it some type of a descriptive name and that way whenever you come inside here your presets are gonna be stored right there and they're very different from developed presets I'm not going to show up over here on the left hand side but they will show up and here's here's tip number three point five is they'll show up under the radial and the graduated filter too so even though you're creating them under the brush they actually share the settings so you can use those same presets across the graduated and the radial filter as well okay folks please make sure you head over to Matt Cade comm slash light and that is the the page for my no light no problem course depending on when you're watching this it's a it might not be out yet but it'll be out in just a couple of days and you can see the video there you can download the video you can also download the free presets that I mentioned inside of here which are just a couple of my favorite sunshine adding presets here inside of Lightroom okay thanks for watching so much I hope you enjoyed and I'll talk to you again real soon

Channel: Matt Kloskowski

Views: 89,053

Keywords: lightroom, lightroom brush, lightroom tips, mattk

Id: WDo3a-Wddic

Length: 11min 52sec (712 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 07 2018