Lightroom: How to Really Really Really Use the Gradient Filter, Part 1

[Music] greetings my photo homies and welcome to pro photo tips my name is Josh crimson you can find me on instagram and facebook at joshua crypt photography now in this video i want to show you how to really really really really use the grad filter within adobe lightroom it's an incredibly powerful tool and it lives within a suite of local adjustment tools which basically just means it's a way that you can edit or adjust one part or one section of your image without adjusting the other parts of your image this video is broken up in a couple of parts in this first one I'm going to walk you through the mechanics of how to create a grad filter how to manipulate it and how to edit it after the fact then in the next part of the video I'm going to show you some best practices I'm going to show you how you can actually use a grande filter or some of my favorite applications of the grad filter so that you can really be a grad filter ninja so let's dive in and I'll show you a little bit more what I'm talking about the first thing we need to do is actually access the grad filter tool and there's two ways you can do it the first is you can take your little old mouse and bring it up here to the graduated filter button or you can see how in parentheses it says M you can just hit m as in maniacal monkeys mashing meymaneh 'he's sure let's go with that that brings up this panel right here so essentially what you're looking at you can ignore this part right here set sky dark and we'll get into that in a little bit here in a second these are all adjustments that if you're at least somewhat familiar with Lightroom you should recognize you've got white balance adjustments exposure contrast highlights shadows whites blacks clarity dije saturation sharp there's noise mo RA and D fringing now it's not all of the adjustments that you've got within Lightroom but it's a heck of a lot of them and what the grant filter lets you do is apply any of these adjustments or a combination of whichever ones you like to part of the frame and not part of the other frame so in order to see how this works let's style in an example for instance when I look at this image I can say well this guy looks a little bright maybe we can darken it down and indeed we can using a grad filter so let me grab the exposure and I'll slide that down say about a stop now here are the mechanics of how the grad filter works you can see this little plus sign hovering over the image now wherever I click and start dragging that's where my adjustment is going to be applied and as I drag across the image you'll see that the adjustment is applied from where I clicked and it gradually fades out across the width of my filter from the top line to the bottom line to where my hand tool is down here at the bottom so I can make an extremely abrupt adjustment if I make this line very very very small like this or it can make an extremely gradual adjustment if I make it a big grad filter like that in either situation the mechanics are the same starts at the top fades out through the middle and ends at the bottom now you can see how as I move the mouse around the things a little bit squirrely so if you hold the shift key when you're doing this that actually allows you to draw a line perfectly straight and you can either go top to bottom like that or you can go left to right or right to left or even bottom to top so there's no specific way you have to use a grad filter and so we could actually instead of darkening the sky increase the brightness of the foreground instead and achieve somewhat of a similar effect in fact the spoiler alert we might do both on this image so as soon as I let go of my mouse here that grad filter is in place if I need to adjust it if I decide you know what it's at a weird angle or it's too abrupt it's very easy to do I can just come back to where my hand tool shows up again and I can either click the top or the bottom and I can move that part of the filter around and if I need to rotate it all I got to do is move my mouse over the centerline and I can rotate it that way if I need to move the grad filter as a whole I can just click on that dot in the middle and move it wherever I want so you can see that it's a pretty intuitive tool it's easy to make things happen now what's cool about it as long as I have this grad filter itself selected I can go back and I can undo that adjustment or I can make it stronger I can add other adjustments to it as much as I want say one of the D Hays that sky maybe I wanted to make that sky supersaturated you know I can do all of those things on that same grad filter very very straightforward now there's a couple of other things you need to know about the mechanics of grad filters before we get into the finer point one of those is you can see how if I move my mouse off the right-hand side of the frame that grad filter disappears and you can control whether or not that happens by going down here to the show edit pins right now I have it on auto which hides it if you move your mouse off of the image you can select always which means no matter what you do with your mouse it's going to be there you can select never which means well it never shows up or you can use selected and what that means basically is you can actually overlap multiple grad filters within the same image so whatever grad filter you're currently working with is your selected one that's the one that Lightroom is going to show typically I like to use auto here there's one other thing that you can do to help your grad filters be a little more visual and the way that they work which is tick this show selected mask overlay button and what that does is it creates this kind of hazy green or hazy white or hazy red mask showing exactly where your adjustment is being applied if you find that to be more visually helpful and you can change the color of this mask by hitting shift o on your keyboard and you can cycle through white or black or red personally I think Green is the most obnoxious color and that's why I like that one because it's the easiest to see I'm going to turn that back off okay so just for the sake of this tutorial I'm going to put this on always so we know when we've got a grad filter up in action at this point it's also helpful to know that your grad filter can be tuned even more than this so with this image you can see how these mountains kind of rise up out of the plane and form this high point here and then fall back down so if you didn't want to darken those mountains how could you do it because if I slide the grad filter itself back up you'll see that this part down here starts to get hazy and ugly again I don't want that instead I want to kind of deselect just this part in the middle well if you come up here and you see the brush command all you have to do is click on that and now instead of a grant filter we have an adjustment brush and by default when you click on that it preserves it preserves the same editing adjustments that you have on your grad filter and you can now paint those in on other parts of the image so this is really cool if you want to add to the effect of your grad filter and again if I hover over there and show that overlay you can see now I've added this this adjustment all over the image but that's not what I wanted right so let me hit undo what I wanted to do was subtract out the adjustment off of those mountains well if I go down here to the bottom you can see how there is an erase button if I click on that sure enough brings up a little eraser you can see there's a minus sign right in the middle of it let me increase the feathering I like doing things a little more softly and now what I can do is then I can actually go in here and erase out that grad filter adjustment from where I don't want it to be applied and once again if I show that mask overlay sure enough now it's more uniformly attached to the sky and not as much on those mountains so you can go ahead and play with that to your heart's content to get the exact shape of the adjustment that you want so let's go ahead and go back to our grad filter by hitting the edit button so now we're back on our grad filter and I'll uncheck that I don't want to see it anymore so those are the mechanics of the grad filter it's a pretty straight forward tool and in the next part it's video I'm going to show you some best practices so that you can really really really really use a grad filter like a Lightroom ninja as always thanks for watching if you enjoyed this video you can check out our newsletter for more free tips questions of the week get reviews and more or if you're looking for in-depth photography and Photoshop and Lightroom tutorials you can check out the nature photography academy until next time have fun and happy shooting

Channel: Joshua Cripps Photography

Views: 253,872

Keywords: Lightroom, Gradient Filter, Photography, Photography Tips, Grad Filter, Post-Processing

Id: XZc0ISalAbQ

Length: 9min 26sec (566 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 20 2017