The amazing TOOL I use on EVERY PHOTO in LIGHTROOM

in this video i'm going to show you my favorite tool in lightroom and that is the graduation filter and it's got a myriad of possibilities and in this video i'm going to go through my favorite morning everybody fantastic to see you all again so i've been meaning to talk about this tool in lightroom for ages now but i've been out on location a lot more recently so i've not been spending as much time in the studio i've been doing some videos on location but this week i've got a little bit of time so i just want to do a fairly quick video just on the tool which is the gradient filter now everyone's going to think oh that's boring but there are so many things that you can do with a gradient filter in lightroom which means quite often that i don't have to go into photoshop and i prefer editing my photos in lightroom so let's go straight into this tool and i've got quite a few different examples of how i'd use it and wait to the end because there's a really really useful one that i want to show you and if you like this video also give it a thumbs up i massively appreciate it okay so let's get into this so the first photo is this photo here and um just so if you don't know this is the gradient filter this button here you can click it and you get options that you can then apply by applying a filter to the image so for instance in this one here i'm just going to select this part of the image and if i hover over this you can see it's just selected this bottom part of the image and then if i want to i can go and make changes to it lighter darker etc but the clever thing you can do is you can select things like colors so for instance in this one if i wanted to just make the green a little bit greener and make it pop a little bit more i can just click color and i can click the little picker here and i can just say i'm just going to pick this green here now you can also do it like that as well so you can do a selection of colors but i'm just going to click a green here put it back click o and you can see now that the greens in the image are selected and then i've got all these tools here to apply to those greens so i can make them darker i could just make them increase the exposure of them a little bit i can make them more green which is one of the things i want to do make them a little bit maybe warmer as well and it just gives you a little bit finer control over the colors rather than using a tool like the hsl sliders here so that's the first one really easy to do let's get on to the next one which is the most obvious really which is darkening the sky so we've got a really simple photo here and i maybe just want to darken the sky here so i can just select this it's going to do a graduated filter from no filter to 100 filter there and i could just simply just darken it now what i like to do when i'm doing that is i darken the sky but then i also apply another one further up to darken it a little bit higher up because i feel like just add something a little bit special to to the image now you can obviously do this to taste and and to the conditions i also tend to change the temperature a little bit of this higher or one as well maybe i just want to warm up the clouds a little bit higher up and you can see that it's super easy to be able to apply those graduated filters and create really amazing photos that were fairly dull before so we've gone from this to this with this graduated filter okay so going on to the next thing that i do and that is just using luminance masks with these graduated filters and i do that quite a lot on the sky so for instance this one um this is a a shot i took in this is a shot i took on the outer sky i think this is towards harris actually and i could do a graduated filter here because i might want to just darken the top part of the sky but if i darkened it i'd also be dark darkening this cloud here but you can also because you're you've got access to all these tools you can darken just parts of it so i could just say just darken the blacks and you can do that this way by just going black like that or i can use a range mask and lose a luminance and say okay i don't want to darken the light so i'm just going to click o here so this will deselect the light areas of the image and then i can just change the exposure and change the exposure of these dark areas that means that rather than just using the blacks to do it i've then got access to all these tools on these dark tones so maybe i want to make these a little bit warmer or cooler and it's just so powerful it just is so good you can do so much with it okay so let's go on to a shot like this where you think well there's just no point in using a graduated filter on this but you'd be wrong because i always use graduated filters on my woodland shots so for instance this shot which is called two tribes which is a shot from my book woodlands which is still available need a copy to show you but i haven't got one which is bad never mind um but anyway this was a shot from my book woodlands and i've just knocked off the filter that i applied to it which was a graduated filter and i've just applied it from the bottom here because i want it to apply to these light tones in the image and the way i do that is rather than just using the luminance mask i use the color mask and just select here which is the lighter tones in the image and what it's going to do then if i just put that back as you can see it selected all the light areas but then i can also control that a bit so what i can do here is i can just reduce that a little bit so it doesn't change the trunks of the trees too much but changes the background and then when i've done that i can then what i want to do here is just warm up the tones in that background light area you can see that that's just creating such a nice glow in the back of the image it's so powerful this graduated tool for doing things like this and making your woodland photos just have that sort of extra special element to them so for instance in this shot another thing you can do with the graduated filter is um this shot i want to brighten up and almost make it a little bit more foggy and i did this in an image in my book so the way to do that is probably i could just increase this exposure a little bit but i don't want it to increase the exposure of the whites in the image because then it just goes a bit flat and i don't like that so the way you can do that is if i just choose a graduated filter and just put it from say here down it's just selecting these areas and then do a luminance mask i'll show the mask and then what i can do is say just don't select the brighter areas and you can see now it's just selecting the darker areas in here i can change the amount of that which is how harsh it is 50 is about right and then if i increase the exposure on these now you can see that i've got that sort of more ethereal look to the image without blowing out the whites in the image so then what i might want to do is i might just want to do something to this area because it's blowing out a bit much but when we get to the end i'll come back to this image and i'll show you what you can do there okay on to the next one which is changing color temperatures this is so important and i do this all the time as well this is a great image i talked about it a few years ago now but i want to re-explain it i'll link to the video where i talk i showed about editing it in detail here i'll link to the video here um so here this bottom area i wanted to make bluer and it's just as simple as creating an gradient mask and then i can just reduce the color of it and i can really add some coldness into that it was this frosty morning i wanted to show that super easy to do a gradient mask is just such a good way of doing it one of the things that people often um struggle with when they're in the field and using a graduated filter is if that graduated filter goes over a hill then it darkens the hill so usually if you're in the field and using a graduated filter it would go a little bit like this you put the graduated filter on your camera it'd look a bit like this and i would maybe put it about there and i darken it darken it down maybe it's a six stop and the problem is that it darkens this mountain down and it does the same obviously when you do it in lightroom as well unless you use this really clever feature which is the brush and brushing away elements now there's two ways to do this you could use the brush click arrays here and then i could just erase it off but the problem is if i do that so if i do that here you'll see that i raise it off the sky as well so it's not great really if i look at the the filter i've created the sort of halo around the mountain which is not what you want so you think i'm probably going to have to do this in photoshop however it's a really simple tool if i just reduce my brush a little bit you just have to click the square bracket the left square bracket on on the keyboard to do that so i'm just going to reduce it to about this size and then all i have to do is click auto mask and once i've got that mask i can just do this really clever thing which is all i need to do is make sure that i click somewhere that is similar to the luminosity level and color level of this particular mountain here so all i'm going to do is i'm just going to click about here and i can just quite happily just delete this mask and you can see that it is sticking to the curvature and the shape of that mountain so now i've got a real nice mask that's perfectly matched to that mountain and i can then just change the luminosity levels of the sky to exactly what i want the cleverest bit is if i just leave that mask on when i move this up and down it stays there so i can then alter my graduated filter and it keeps that masking around the mountain it's so clever i use this all the time and you can do it on really you know integra things like this so this is a perfect example of where i've used this already but i can do it again so let's just zoom in to 100 so we can see it um you know quite accurately i'm just going to create a mask here and obviously if i do that it masks everything and the problem is that then when i darken it it's going to darkly darken these c stacks but if i just use the brush tool and the erase tool i can then just make sure it's set to auto mask and you don't have to be that careful i can just basically just get rid of it like this and it's going to keep a really nice edge to this sea stack here even that bird on top there is perfectly masked i can now change that and i've got a perfectly masked c-stack it is so powerful that and you can do the same for this so if i wanted to i could go into this and i could think okay i want to brush and erase this down here so if i just click auto mask look at the mask make sure i click on the green and i can just get rid of that on this bank here because i don't want it to lighten that bank and um that's it i might want to just do it a little bit further across there but you can see just how useful that is so the graduated filter the graduated mask is so so good and really can help your photography so give it a try try all the things i've done there i'm sure it'll really help your images and if you've got any other tips or top tips with lightroom using that mask put them in the comments below and it'd be really useful to everybody okay i hope you've enjoyed this shorter video and until next sunday bye [Music] you

Channel: Nigel Danson

Views: 103,068

Keywords: photography, lightroom, lightroom tutorial, lightroom tips, lightroom trickts, photography tips, tutorial, nigel danson, Nigel Danson photography

Id: QVuaFMyUWVU

Length: 12min 44sec (764 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 06 2021