Original unedited shot
One of the major failings of Lightroom is (or was, read on) that all editing is global. Changing anything changes the whole image. Those used to selections and layers in Photoshop or any of its clones found this lack very limiting…and generally resorted to an external editor when needed. To be fair, Lightroom makes opening your image in an external editor as painless as possible, and even gives you several choices about how to manage it.
Beginning with Lightroom 2.0 though, Adobe has implemented an Adjustment Brush feature. I have to admit that I have neglected this feature for months now, after experimenting with it briefly when I first upgraded to 2.0.
This week I featured an image on my Pic of the Day posts on digital-photography@yahoogroups.com and Digital_Photography_Forum@yahoogroups.com, and among the responses was a suggestion that the background was too bright and distracting. The original image is at the top of the post. Here is the first Lightroom edited version (the one that drew the comment).
1st Lightroom edit
Edit settings for 1st edit.
As you see from the screen shot above, I adjusted Recovery to reclaim highlight detail, shifted the black point to deepen the blacks, added some Clarity (local contrast), and some Vibrance (selective saturation). I also applied the Landscape Sharpen preset.
Once I got the “background is too bright” comment, I began to wonder what could be done. First I made a virtual copy of the original with its Lightroom edits to work on (just select Virtual Copy from the Image menu). I will show you screen shots for the three steps involved and then the final image. It is important to remember that these changes took less than 5 minutes in Lightroom.
second edit settings
I adjusted the blackpoint a bit more. and added both Brightness and Contrast. The Brightness was because I had adjusted the curves to suppress the the lights and highlights: like this.
Level curve adjustment to supress highlights and lights.
Still the background was too bright and the foreground was now too dark. That’s when I remembered the Adjustment Brush. I used it to lower the exposure of the background by one stop, and to raise the exposure of the tree by one stop. With the AdjBrush you simply choose the controls and the intensity and then brush the changes on to the area of the image you want changed. Very fast. Very intuitive. Small control circles are left behind. When you hover the mouse over a control circle it highlights both the area of the adjustment and its intensity. You can then apply other AdjBrush effects to the same area if needed. Here are the two steps.
Adjustment Brush pass one: decreasing exposure of background 1 stop.
Adjustment Brush 2: increase the exposure of the tree 1 stop
And with that, again, no more than 5 minutes after starting, I had this.
Final image, with all edits
It pleased the gentleman who made the original comment, and, I think I like it better too.
I am certain now that I will be making more use of the Adjustment Brush. I wonder what I could do with that image from Scotland….
