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Local Adjustments

Lesson 15 from: Intro to Lightroom CC for Beginners

Daniel Gregory

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Lesson Info

15. Local Adjustments

Move into local adjustments with the tools that can apply to only portions of the image. Remove unwanted things in the image with spot removal techniques to eliminate things like dust spots and acne with the healing brush, and learn how to import the image into Photoshop CC if the brush isn't doing the trick. Adjust specific parts of the image using the graduated filter tool, radial filter, and adjustment brush.

Lesson Info

Local Adjustments

we had a little snafu with the importing of a profile. I just want to show that actually figured out what my little is she was. And it turns out I don't know how to build a profile on expert at a photo shop, but I have now successfully exported the photo shop. So in the light panel, you can come up here and we do the, uh, browse all profiles, click on our little add menu, go to import profiles, go to your profile settings and down here about this little this is cool. We import that and that appears under my user set profiles. So those are the two different profiles we create. So they import, we jump to the computer screen and they will have the actual import there for the two pieces. So that's the way to get that. Actually in there, the earlier was just a corrupted export of light room. So that's all sorted out and fixed. We want to do now. Those jump into our local adjustments for actually making the edits I'm gonna come back into those demo files are going to pick up that original im...

age we started with. So we can actually finish this one out. We're gonna use this. Emanates to base that cover the local adjustments that will jump onto the IPad. I'll shoot the local adjustment. There is a little bit of hand sleight of hand sort of thing you have to do with their with local adjustments. We'll take a look at that. Ah, local adjust in terms of cropping. If you click on the crop tool you can grab, the edge is and re size for the crop there. Straighten that horizon line. Do ah, rotate their, um, change the orientation of the crop. Um, reset the crop and go back. So we've got the crop there. If you need to flip in images one of the areas where people have asked hello, how do the rotation Flippen CC You can. Actually, the flip is actually buried into the crop and rotate tool. This tool is a healing brush tool. So what? The healing breast Tulis four is removing things in the image that you don't want? One of its great things it can do is remove dust spots. So if we click on the healing brush tool, there's an option here to visualize. Does spots and as you would just the threshold it builds up edge, Master basically kind of show you were dustup spots might be in this image. We zoom in right here that little dot right there is a dust spot. And so, with the visualized image you basically here in in a clone mode here, or you could do a hell mode. The difference between the two is a clone Mode says. I'm gonna take up snap, and I'm gonna grab something from somewhere else in the image and I'm gonna stamp it over. On top is a clones. What's an exact copy? Healing says kind of Look at the luminosity and the colors of the original and use the area that it's okay that I want to blend in and try to blend those together for kind of a natural Look, try one. If it looks terrible, try the other one. It's kind of hit or miss, but basically to get rid of the spot, I'll just click on it. You could see it actually grabs and Nike and then move the spot around. Worried actually grabs, and we'll source from, and I'll show you that more on the color image is a lot easier ceiling. Correct someone else, but for death spots uses gonna grab the closest thing a confined to help Remove. Um, that dot Turn that back off. If we come down here, though, I've got, like, this little bit of, ah, kind of tough of grass right there. I want to get rid of that. I'm not quite yet. I want to get rid of that little white spots. It's right at the edge of the frame. And if I printed, I think it's gonna be a distraction. So zoom in here a little bit. I've got the brush, and if I use the keyboard shortcut is the bracket keys. If I make the brackets to the right, it'll get larger to the left, will get smaller, and if you look, you can see there's two circles in there. There's an outer circle that's really thin, and then there's a little bit darker central circle. There you can see the inner circle moves in the outer circle. Doesn't that's a feather? Fall off on the brush, so the stronger the feather. It makes a little great Asian off the edge of the brush to make it a little softer. If there is no further there, it's a hearted. So in some cases you need a hard edge of the brush. And sometimes you kind of need the feather to taper off. So it's not quite as obvious. That is true in the local brushes. Well, we have that same feathering effect and Harding effect. So it's a universal across all the tools. So in this case, I wanted to be a little bit soft and what you want, usually when you're doing a healing, is you want the size of the brush to be just a smidge bigger than the thing you're getting rid off and you can paint in wiggle around Now, it used to be you actually had to make the circle corrections. We can now actually kind of make random corrections. But I'm gonna get rid of this one first, and we're gonna get rid of something else and all shooting that basically you just click and gone. So here's the Yeah, I do that. There it is there. Click over it and grab something and I could grab anything Not good. So you want something that blends in as natural as possible when you're cloning, the thing to watch out for is if you look here, if I clone that, you see the literal thing that I'm on shows up. But if I change my brush to a hell, it's going to attempt to blend those together. And as long as I'm not really far out of the range sometimes will give me a little bit smoother cleaning effect. I can adjust the feather here on the and the opacity is how strong should that affect me. So maybe what I need to do is make the stamp for the correction. But if I make it not 100% it will kind of soften it up a little bit. Maybe that thing that shows through a tiny bit it won't be as egregious to show the correction, because again, what you don't want somebody to do is look at your photographic target, fixate like Oh my gosh, you cloned out a piece that we should never know. Something was removed up here. Let's see, like I want to get rid of this purple flower. If you click and hold the mouse down, it'll let you build a whatever size section you want Now The trick is it replaces it with the thing that's the same shape is what you removed. So if we zoom A If you look up here, here's the circle that it created its, um, eared shape of whatever I painted below. So when people first start doing this, what they don't realize is in light room. It literally says, if you're gonna make a Z shape, I'm gonna go find something to clone in, and it's gonna be easy shaped. It's a mirror of the brush stroke. So you want to not be just loosey goosey crazy ways e with your breast stroke. So if I want to get rid of these this piece over here, I little I just want to kind of come down and back up a little bit to get rid of that so that it it's just smooth. It's possible if I start doing weird stuff. It's Carter for that brush to find a spot that's gonna actually look like just the grass without floating up into something else. If you had to remove a lot of stuff, I would edit in photo shop, and we're not gonna go into Photoshopped But just to show you, you can right click on your image. Um, and you can choose edit in photo shop. It will pull that image out of light from CC bed in photo shop, sink it back up. And so it's kind of the edit in and classic, um, editing and photo Shop is the only third party tool editor we have. So if you're used to use in something like Topaz or ah Nik software plug ins or on one plug ins, Sisi doesn't support the third party plug in. Currently, it's just editing in photo shop, So that would be your 1/3 party editing tool. So once you go through kind of do your spot healing spot healing, I I do, is I kind of kind of at this point, I'm trying to get rid of stuff that it just annoys me like, get rid of that. It doesn't really matter when you do it. The spot healing, the processing of the file and the order, the instructions are going to be done. It will assure that the right luminosity and the right values air on everything. I'm gonna jump to the ah radio tools first the greatest are that the radios was the grating tools. First not come back to the brush, even though this is the local adjustment brush. Next, there's two types of greedy INTs. There's a linear Grady in, which draws a big straight line, and there's a radio Grady in which radiates is a circle. So we'll look at both of those in this case, we originally added this image, and I set the luminosity for the foreground, and I knew I lost all that beautiful detail in the clouds. But I was gonna fix that with a greedy int tool. So the linear ingredient tool keyboard shortcuts l. So if you want to get in with that way and you basically you can click and drag down, you just click and drag. And that dot represents the center point of the Grady int. And then, if you look at the grating, down here is a line. Here is that midpoint line, and here's the top line of ingredient from the mid line above, left to right to the back. 100% of the effect is applied from that mid line to the front line of the bottom line is the feathering off of the greedy int. If you want to see that effect, if you click over them. If you mouse over the little dot the Grady it shows up. So the things in red there is 100% applied, and then you see that rid slowly start to taper off is a drops into the foreground. So that just shows you kind of have that effect is now the great part about that grading, is it? Onley applies the effect where it is. So now what I'm gonna do is drop the exposure of the Grady int and my sky comes back in. And because it's a Grady int, the effect is stronger at the top and it fades out to the bottom. So you see, there's almost no change and that image except at the top of the mountains. I'm gonna show you how to fix that in a second. But I've now got my sky color back in, and I've got all of the tools here that I could make my adjustments. So let's say like, I want a little more punch in the cloud so I can apply clarity. I could even apply a little bit of D. Hayes into the clouds. I'll drop the saturation out a little bit. Maybe I want to change the colors, and I want to make Midwest Tornado clouds a little aggressive on the training we've ever been in the Midwest. Tornado clouds have this eerie green color you'll never forget, so I could paint in like who It was ominous tornado clouds, but you could see the color overall effect of the image isn't change. It's on Lee, where that radiant supplied. If I want to change the Grady Int as long as that white dot is in the ingredient, that's the green and have active and I can come down here and now you see my hand when I mouse over the line actually grabs it, and I can actually change the relative height positional ingredient. Or if I come to the midline, you could see how it turns into a little kind of half bowed circle. What that's gonna let me do is rotate the Grady Int now everybody rotates right here, don't driving that bad. It's really hard to control. As you move farther out, though, you can really finesse the control, so work the edges of the Grady into actually move your grading up and down our your rotation of your radiant. The other thing that's in a Grady int is if you look up here, there's a brush in an eraser. If I come in in a race, I'm allowed to come in in a race parts of the Grady in. So if I bring the radiant farther down and you could see its impact in the top of that hill, I can erase the effect of the Grady in out. So the radiance in the sky. But I'm able to remove it from the foreground. So now it really only applies to this guy, even though I needed to kind of feather and down there. This was recently or not recently. And this is that in several version to go where we can go in and use Ah, brush tool inside the Grady and Tool. But it is limited to only the effect of ingredient. And so it's these tools, not this tool, and it allows you to remove that effect. So I'm gonna make it even more egregious so you can see the I'll make new grading hamburger to that grating to make a new Grady int. You could see now that Grady its way down onto that foreground of that hill. But I don't want it. There was I clicked. The eraser. You can see I'm actually painting the effect out of I'm erasing the effect of that mask of the radiant out. So if you're used to photo shop, you're basically just editing the mask over the weren't applies. This is Ah, one of my favorite things. It's been at it in. If you've got, like, buildings or trees, you draw down, you can now erase the building out and you're not having to try to, like, do an adjustment brush to remove the effect that never looks right. So this just little allows us to remove it out. His are those tools also in the classic? Yeah, So that's the so radio one. Now, the cool part about it, the kind of tip that I have for people, is that's making more normal looking one. Let's reset the grating here. I'm gonna draw ingredient, drop the exposure, and I kind of like how it looks here in this midpoint area right in here. But I can add another Grady Int so I can stack effects, likens a stack local effects on top of one another and build up more and more effect. So that's probably a little strong from the overall edit. But I could come back in and allow that image to Maybe I made a lightning. I want that sort of looks. So I've got a chance now to use multiple Grady INTs on top of one another. Same thing with radio grades and local brush. Sometimes to get the effect you want. You paint multiple times with multiple brushes, so that's the linear ingredient, even on an image of our mom crab. A different image. I grab an image like this. We do a linear greeting across that sky. Whoa, Let's try that again. There's the Grady int. I'm gonna go ahead and dark and the exposure up. So now I've kind of got that feather coming out of the corner and then I'm like, Oh, well, I want to actually deal with this foreground a little bit. I could draw grading up from the bottom. Maybe I wanna lightened that up and increase the saturation there, there so I can apply. Grady. It's all over the place as many as I want in different ways. Oh, say you didn't like that effect and you wanted to back up. How would you get there? So I could, uh, take that radiant, and I could just as long as it's got the white dot in their immediate selected. And if I click on this one and just click on the dot It selected just a the delete key, and it removes the radio. Now, if I've done a bunch of work and I've got an image here and I lost sorts of crazy stuff happened and I've got this kind of thing going on and I'm like, I can hit, shift our and reset back to the original on imports like this, they just trash everything and go back to the beginning. And that shift our that removes all of my stuff. Everything. So I've got everything is wacked out shift Our is your global reset. I'm gonna grab this one to show you the radio. Radiant. So the radio Grady, it works is a circle. So in this case, I want to work just this kind of middle part of the gobby. So you can see there is the circle And if I click on it, I could not drag and reposition it just like I can the linear in this case. Okay, so now on a bright and the exposure up in the middle, you drop the highlight a little bit. And I'm like, I actually want the inside darker I can invert the greedy int. So now the my mouse over, you'll see the ah effects on the outside, not on the inside. Same thing with the linear one. So I'm able to bounce back and forth and I've got the same set of tools in here so I can decrease the saturation. I'm like, No, no, actually, I should decrease the saturation on the inside. We don't that up, and I can have multiple ones of those so I could come in and I can rotate these. So I grabbed that. Rotate that, and I can extend it, change the shape of it so I could come in and get literally just that middle part of that leaf. I did, and I could change the feather of it. Hard edge, a soft edge. And I've got the same removal tool. If I need to paint out. For some reason the radio tool would it first came out. I was like, I'm landscape historically person. I was like, Hey, why would I need that portrait work? You're going to grab face, um, grab small rounder section like that pinball stuff. I'm working on a pinball Siri's. I go grab the individual controls really easily with a radio grading to rob long shaped kind of thing. So it's actually it's a really, actually kind of useful selection. Peace and the fact that you can squish and change the size and rotated is a really nice piece. But we work that little edge to kind of get that that piece. Okay, the last, uh, adjustment brush last local. Those air regional adjustments were going to the local adjustment with local adjustment brush. And this is the one that is probably the hardest to get your head handle on using the most frustrating to use. So the one people avoid using, we avoid pain so we don't want to use it, and as a result, our photographs into sufferings. There's things we should go in and locally identify and target to fix with a brush but because it's hard, we don't do it. Um, Jump back in. I'm gonna grab it's grab this image. When I click on the adjustment brush I can image can have again, Just like the grating could have a number of different brushes. The key in your workflow and the place where people get really tripped up is it's one brush per adjustment. So if I'm gonna lighten that, we're gonna lighten up this area right here on the, um Damn, we're gonna lighten that up a little bit. And then I also want to lighten this up area a little bit. This would be one brush. This would be another brush because the effect is tied to the brush. So if I pain three spots and I get the brightness right for one area and it's not right for the other, that's all tied together. Everywhere that brushstroke hits, that effect gets applied. So up here, I've got the plus sign for had a brush. So I wanna come over here and I'm just gonna loosely pain over here, and then we will bringing that up. So I bright in that area. And then if I want to create the adjustment over here, I would come in here and get a second brush and paint there because then I could say I actually want that to be darker There. You can see that change there so each brush gets its own sitting size of the brush. And then if you click in, you'll get the option for the feather, how wide to the feather be and then flow in density. So these two things are a little confusing when you first get started, Flo is the rate at which this stuff is coming off of the brush. The density is the maximum level of the effect. So if you set the density to 50% doesn't matter how many times you make the brush stroke the most of the effect you'll get US Flow says. Build up the effect with every brushstrokes. If I set my floater like 2025 I gotta paint 5678 times to get the full effect up. I personally, unless I know for sure I want to adjust density. I like that my density a pie and I like my flow in the 2025 30% range unless I know. I'm just gonna hammer the effect. I want to build the effect up so I can see. At what point does it have what I'm looking for? Because I actually don't know what the number is that people like. Well, how much How much brighter should be? I don't know, 1.5 1.75 six to, I don't know until I look at it, but if I say I think it's probably plus two. So I'm gonna go to to my flows at 30% and I start brushing up and then I just stopped when it's good, and if it's not enough, when it's 100% applied, I can always adjust the brightness skin, but I brush up to the level. So in that case, what we're gonna do here is we're going to set the flow at 38%. Then let's go on ahead and we're going to do it. I'm gonna just de saturate so you can actually see how the flow buildup is. We're gonna make the brush a little bit smaller here. It was like paint. Each time I paint. Can you see how the sky starting to de saturate. That's probably do it down here in the old easier seat. See how the yellow slowly starting to saturate on that hill. And every time I paint, I get less and less saturation in there until it's eventually 100% de saturated. So that re brushing means that I get to build the effect up. The reason people struggle with that is there, like I got to make that brush stroke exactly the same every time. But panel walking tablet makes it easier, but you can get it even with a track pad in a mouse. And if your feathers a little white, a little bit of a feather on it, and you don't have that super heart edge if you wiggle a little bit, it's not gonna be too bad. And if I hold down the option key, you can see the plus symbol in their changes to a minus. So it turns into the eraser, which is this icon also right here. Now I can come in. I'm gonna just my brush in Oh my God! And I need that down here and I can erase the effect off of the brush. So even if I go outside the color outside the lines. I can always go back in a race from the lines. I also think it's better to over paint and go outside the lines and race back in. It just seems easier to make the correction go a little far and then a race. So your workflow is basically paint a race paint race pain trait. So I'm really doing this. And then I'm like, Nope. Add that back in pink That out had that back in assuming the overlays can be turned on for the brushes, just like they are. And, uh, can the color of the overlay be changed in C. C. I don't think so. Every time I've ever if it is, I would love to know. But every time I've ever read about it or looking help file or attempted to change it, it's bread, and it always says to show the red overlay. So as far as I know, that's a piece. We also had a question from Stefano, who was wondering if that the flow option is available for the brush in the IPad and IPhone version of C. C. I think he was not seeing it there or had asked that question earlier as well. I think you look so the question was, can you use a pencil with or pen with the IPad? I Yeah, I don't ever remember seeing it. And I'm trying like the two finger piece. I don't ever remember seeing that in the IPad IPhone version. I know you could change the feather hardness of the brush, but I don't remember seeing the flow piece in there. It's one of the ones that, uh, would be tactically because of the haptics. And the feedback response would be an interesting programmatic challenge. Um, to that. Is it possibly pressure sensitive on the IPad? Doesn't seem to change in that, um, hit theory, sir. Yeah, I don't even see where to set. It is the other one. So yeah. Great question. I find the answer. All email, everybody. Um, the other option here is the auto mask. And so what auto mask does is it will If it's got a good edge to find, it will find the edge and draw a little bit sharper mask for you. So if I'm gonna come down here and do this work on the water and I won't make that Bressler brighter and I paint. You can see I'm actually spreading into the water, my brushes halfway into the water. But it's only affecting the wall, so it's wherever the plus sign is. It's going to get the effect, so it helps me kind of stay contained. When that works well, it's awesome. And when it's bad, it's bad. And so I don't always start with it on. I actually prefer to have it often working. Then if I find I've got a good edge, a nice, sharp edge like that, I'll use the auto mask. But it's Ah, skin tones. It will sometimes grab some weird stuff where it can't find an edge or move over stuff that I don't understand Why. But ah, good contrast In edge point, the auto mask is a nice feature. So what is your working with the brushes? It's not uncommon for an image tohave multiple adjustments on it. So if I want to brighten this hill up back in there, I'm gonna go on ahead and paint my brush in there, bring my exposure up, and then have a different brush to come in and maybe grab a little bit of this water that I want to lighten up to try to accentuate that a different brush kind of come over here in that case, actually wanted dark. In that corner up, she'll end up with multiple brushes over the image and that anywhere where you need to emphasize or de emphasize something is where you're gonna make the adjustment. So there is no like. You always adjust eyebrows. You always adjust. The issue is just this now the other piece for a brush. That's good, though, is if you're doing like portrait work, you want to add sharpness, not on the skin, but you want added into hair and eyebrows in the eye and iris just paint over the eye with a brush, and then you could punch clarity into just the iris. You don't have to apply the clarity to the whole image, and that allows us to target it. Because, remember, we respond to sharpness saturation, and so if you sharpen the I a little bit the Irish, the I r. I's gonna be drawn to that before drawing other things in the eyes of mirrors of this little soul. So we we attached to that. So a little bit of brushwork on on the I. So if I went back and grabbed, you know a portrait here, grab lowering the cat here, I grab a brush. You know, I would make it about the size of the cat's eye and then just paint the I and then apply a little clarity into the eye. Not a huge amount, just a little bit of clarity in maybe punch the highlight just a little bit. Just so it gets a little bit of brightness. There was paint over that. I just a little punch of that just kind of helps her I get into there. There's no other way to do that without the brush. Um, in general, I would say Always have not always been. For the most part, you'll have a little feather on the brush just because, ah, hard edge is really easy to see if you missed paint. Um, eso just that little adjustments when the workflow you're just working through until those local local edits are finished and when you're good. Now, the cool part is that with light when I mentioned it earlier, but in Oliver's, like there's nothing to save you. Finish making the breast stroke. It saves. You don't have to worry about like Oh my gosh. I dismayed 400 brushstrokes. I closed my computer and I forgot to save it. Saved? You don't have to worry about pointing that.

Ratings and Reviews

Jean
 

Wonderful class! I am 100% new to any editing tool, but wanted to be able to learn basic edits as well as categorize my photos. Daniel Gregory is able to convey his vast knowledge in such a relaxed, easy to understand way, that I was instantly drawn in. I am admittedly "electronically challenged" and just started a journey into Lightroom CC. After taking this course with Daniel Gregory, I am not only amazed as to the abilities of Lightroom CC and feel much less "overwhelmed" with the program, but am also extremely excited to learn more! Definitively recommend 100%

ERic
 

Daniel Gregory is an outstanding teacher. Simple to learn. Easy to remember. His teaching style is relaxed - but very informative. This is the best Lightroom CC presentation I have had. Bravo!

user-f2e4d5
 

Such a great class! Daniel is so knowledgeable about the whole LR ecosystem and explains complex details clearly. There's so much valuable content packed into this class. I highly recommend for those moving from LR Classic to CC (mobile LR) and for those who are new to LR CC altogether. Highly recommend.

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