tutorial 3 Get to grips with the powerful Adjustment brush tool in Lightroom

George Cairns shows you how to use Lightroom’s Adjustment Brush to create masks for precisely selecting areas for tonal adjustment

There are a whole host of controls to make global adjustments to your images but, more often than not, you may only want to target certain areas within a scene. For this you can use the Adjustment Brush. This tool enables you to selectively apply Exposure, Clarity, Brightness, and other adjustments to images by painting over the specific area in the photo that you want to adjust. In this image it’s ideal for dodging some dark standing stones, while burning more detail into the brighter sky. By altering the size, softness and flow of the Adjustment Brush, you can target and tweak the tones of specific objects with precision.

When you click on a photo with the Adjustment Brush you place an edit pin. This pin records the position and strength of all the tonal adjustments you make. Thanks to edit pins, you can make multiple adjustments to a photo and then click on a pin to finetune its effect at any time. If you click on a pin and drag to the right, you can increase the value setting of each associated slider to, say, brighten the image more or boost the contrast more. Drag left on a pin to reduce the slider settings. By moving the mouse over a particular pin, you can see a red mask overlay that indicates the area that is being adjusted by that pin. The Adjustment Brush strokes we used to lighten the stones were fairly soft and imprecise. It would be quite easy for the brush tip to stray over the background and lighten the sky or ground. So in this tutorial we’ll show you how to use Auto Mask to dodge and burn with much more precision, so you can lighten the complex jagged edges of the dark rocks in our starting image without blowing out the background details.