› ›kelbyone.com091› › lightroom magazine › ›step three: The Adjustment Brush
is found in the toolbox right above the
Basic panel (it’s the tool on the far right,
shown circled here), or just press the
letter K on your keyboard. When you
choose it, an options panel pops down
(seen here) and you’ll see that you can
paint using nearly all the same controls
you have in the Basic panel, except
that Vibrance isn’t there. (Rats!) But, at
least we have other cool stuff, like noise
reduction and moiré removal, so it kinda
makes up for not having Vibrance. Kinda.
With the Adjustment Brush, you choose
which adjustment you want to paint
with by dragging one or more of those
sliders, and then you just start painting
that adjustment right on your photo.
tip: changing brush sizes
To change your brush size, press the
Left Bracket key to make it smaller or
the Right Bracket key to make it bigger.
step four: Since you don’t actu-
ally see the effect until you start paint-
ing on your photo, how do you know
how far to move the sliders? Well, this
is going to sound weird, but you don’t.
You literally just make a blind guess at
how much you think you might want of
a particular adjustment, and then you
paint over the area you want to adjust.
Then, once you can see the adjustment,
you go back to that slider and tweak the
amount until it looks right. The good
part is you get to make your final deci-
sion after you’ve painted over the area,
so you can get it right on the money.
For example, here I (1) got the brush,
(2) dragged the Exposure slider to the
right a bunch, (3) painted over the dark
area on the right side of the dome to
brighten it, and then (4) went back to
the Exposure slider and lowered the
amount until it looked right to me.