Adobe Lightroom For Beginners (2021)

Editing with the

Adjustment Brush

While Lightroom doesn’t offer the comprehensive multi-layered image

manipulation of Photoshop, it does provide the means for very detailed

adjustment of specific areas of your images. The tool we use to achieve

this is the powerful and versatile Adjustment Brush.

1

Our example photo here is a coastal sunrise landscape

but the foreground seating area is a bit under-exposed.

Using the Adjustment Brush we can selectively increase

the exposure in just this area, leaving the rest of the image

unchanged. To get started, click on the Adjustment Brush icon

on the right of the editing tools bar.

3

Next, we need to set up the brushes. At the bottom of the

Adjustment Brush panel you can see the brush options.

We can have two painting brushes set up, labelled A and B, and

there is also an Erase brush. Click on the A button and then set

the Size to 15 and the Feather to 100. This gives a medium-sized

soft-edged brush for broad work.

2 First, you need to set up the adjustment that you want to

make. In this case it’s very simple, you just want to boost

the exposure to selectively lighten one area of the image. This

shot was taken on a Nikon D810, so the raw file should easily

allow three stops of exposure latitude, but you only need to

boost it by a maximum of two stops.

4 For fine detailed painting, you need a smaller, harder-

edged brush. Click on the B button and set the Size

slider to 5 and the Feather slider to 10. You can also adjust

the size and hardness on the fly by using shortcuts. Brush

size is changed by the [ and ] keys, whilst brush feathering is

changed by { and }, the same keys but with Shift.

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IMPROVE YOUR IMAGE: THE DEVELOP MODULE

BDM’s Made Easy Series | Volume 22