Lightroom Adjustment Brush | Lightroom 4 is a powerful piece of photo editing software from Adobe and the Lightroom adjustment brush is one of its most useful tools. It has come to the stage now that more photographers are doing 90% or more of their work in Lightroom 4 alone and only using Photoshop for really delicate work beyond cloning and stamping. The Lightroom adjustment brush was first introduced in Lightroom 2 and has been growing in functions ever since. The local adjustment brush is similar to a masking paintbrush that “paints” different effects onto your photograph. As it stands this brush can be used to adjust colour temperature, colour tint, exposure, contrast, highlights, shadows, clarity, saturation, sharpness, noise, moire, defringe and colour.

Using the Lightroom Adjustment Brush.

Lightroom 4 is broken up into different modules for completing different tasks in your workflow. For example in the library module you can import and make your selection for editing which is done in the develop module. The lightroom adjustment brush or local adjustment brush is the paintbrush symbol with a circle of dots and is located in the top right hand corner. All you have to do is select this tool and the adjustments brush control panel pops up. This is where you can select the effect you want and the level of effect that is applied.

Once you start painting the effect that you want the changes happen on screen in real-time. A major benefit of using Lightroom 4 is that the changes that you make are all non destructive. This means that you can always go back to the original digital file without risk of “saving over” it.

As Lightroom 4 does not support pressure sensitive drawing tools, like a tablet, you have to make fine adjustments to your brush in the control panel. For example you will need to adjust the brush’s size, feathering, the flow and density manually.

Local Adjustment Tool.

The vast majority of editing that is done in Lightroom 4 is similar to the changes that were made in the darkroom. The most common are brightness, contrast, spotting burning and dodging. The best thing about the Lightroom adjustment brush is that the changes can be made locally. Take this example below. The only adjustments made were the healing tool to remove a few blemishes, the histogram tool to slightly bump the highlights and also the adjustment brush to smooth the skin for a glowing look and to dodge some of the shadow on the right of the image.

Lightroom 4 Adjustment Brush Tip.

A quick tip to help you get the most out of the Lightroom brushes is to use shortcut keys. A great example of this is to hit the H key to hide the starting point marker and then hit the O key to switch to mask overlay mode, this provides a red mask over the parts of the image that you have applied the desired effect. If you make a mistake, you can hold down the Alt key (option on the Mac) and erase areas where you don’t want the effect to occur.

Lightroom 4 represents a complete editing tool for photographers. It is for those that simply want to concentrate on the editing and output of their work. Have a go at the Lightroom adjustment brush and make your work look its best.

Click here to discover the full line of Seamless Photo Equipment, Camera Accessories, Photo Folders and Photography Software!

Let’s see what you can do.