› ›kelbyone.com095› › lightroom magazine › ›step eleven: Before we get back
to working on our church ceiling,
I wanted to mention one more thing
about Auto Mask. When it’s turned on,
the brush runs a bit slower, because it’s
doing “math” as you paint (determining
where the edges are). So, if I’m paint-
ing over a big sky or wall or other area
that doesn’t need the brush doing fancy
math, I turn it off so things go faster.
Okay, back to our church. I think that, at
this point, you’ve got the idea: In a lot of
images, there are some areas you want
brighter and some you want darker, and
this brush not only lets you do that, but
you can add any of the other sliders, as
well. This is awesome because you can
brighten an area and make it sharper,
or darken an area and make the color
more saturated, too (great for skies).
Let’s go ahead and darken and brighten
a few more areas here (like darkening
the dome at the top center. Then, I’d
brighten the area along the bottom of
the image, darken the two columns up
top on the sides, and even lower the
Highlights in the dome itself to bring
back some detail there. You can see I’ve
got nine Edit Pins now).
tip: how do you know if
you’ve missed a spot?
Press the letter O on your keyboard
to show a red mask over the area you
painted on the active pin (to see it tem-
porarily, move your cursor over the
pin). If you missed an area, paint over
it; if you spilled over onto something
you didn’t want to, press-and-hold the
Option (PC: Alt) key and paint it away.
step twelve: Okay, now, how
about a finishing move that I usually
use in landscape photos to add an ex-
tra “kiss of light” to highlight areas in
the image? Click the New button, make
your brush pretty large, increase the
Exposure to about 1.00, and then click
once over highlight areas as though
little beams of light are hitting them.
Here’s a before/after.