Adobe Lightroom Photo Editing
Just using the built-in presets and basic tools for Adobe Lightroom Photo Editing gives pretty amazing effects with a few clicks of the mouse. However if you want to up your game there are plenty of advanced techniques and features you can use such as Lightroom’s Adjustment Brush panel.
Adobe Lightroom Adjustment Brush
The Adjustment Brush is one of the most powerful tools in Lightroom and accessed via the Develop tab. Using Adjustment Brushes lets you isolate and edit areas of the image and apply effects such as colour, retouching and toning to those individual sections
Working with the Adjustment Brush
Once in the Develop mode you will need to activate the Adjustment Brush Panel as shown below.
After clicking and selecting the Lightroom Adjustment Brush the panel is active as shown below.
Adjustment Brush Panel
Adjustment Panel Brush Options
A & B
Give you access to 2 different brushes.
Click on either the A or the B to activate
This gives you the ability to alternate between the 2 – so for example one might be a soft and the other a hard brush
Erase
Lets you delete anything you have brushed onto the photo without removing the actual pixels.
Quick Tip! The easiest way to work with Erase is by holding down the Alt (PC) Opt (MAC) to activate it.
Brush Size
You can drag the slider to size the brush or:
Quick Tip! Use the [ ] (square brackets) [ left facing shrinks the brush ] right facing enlarges the brush
Brush Feather
This controls the area of the feather transition. The lower the feather value the harder the brush whilst the higher the feather value the softer the brush.
Before and After Adjustment Brush
The original image is on the left with the after one on the right. Although the photo has had other tweaks applied to it the adjustment brush was used to bring out the lights and dark’s in the photo. Two brushes were used on this image – one to lighten and enhance the stray streak of sunlight in the mid to top right of the photo whilst the other brush was used to paint in the dark’s & shadows on the left.
Adjustment Brush Built-in Presets
As well as the A & B brushes Lightroom also comes with a set of built in brushes presets which are known as Dodge, Burn, Skin Softening, Teeth Whitening, Highlights and so forth.
These are activated from the Custom drop down box next to Effect.
Note! In this example the custom box is set to the teeth whitening brush preset.
Online Adobe Lightroom Training
The Adjustment Brush panel is covered in detail and the course is available as live Online Adobe Lightroom Training. This is with a live instructor so you can ask questions, share screens and do just about everything except share tea and biscuits.
Find out more about Online Adobe Lightroom Training
Adobe Photoshop or Adobe Lightroom Training
Not sure whether you should be doing a Photoshop Course or a Lightroom Course.
Thank you for visiting the site.
Don’t have a good day, have a great one
Online & Onsite Lightroom Training Courses
You can download or subscribe to Lightroom here on the Adobe Website
