Lightroom painter tool

I was lured away from Adobe to Capture one about 5 years ago, can't say i'm disappointed with the change at all. Home Topics Lightroom.

The Usefulness of the Painter Tool in Lightroom. Posted In:. Premium Photography Tutorials Check out the Fstoppers Store for in-depth tutorials from some of the best instructors in the business. Log in or register to post comments. Deleted Account - December 26, Well that's a handy doodad. Thank you. Domeyko Photography - December 27, Thank you. A nice find during the holiday season.

J H - December 27, I was lured away from Adobe to Capture one about 5 years ago, can't say i'm disappointed with the change at all. After you tap Select Subject , a color overlay will appear atop what Lightroom assumes is the subject, along with a small pop-out Masks floating palette.

Once this initial mask is created, you can adjust all the standard editing parameters: white balance , exposure, contrast, shadows, texture, saturation , hue, and more.

Every slider and adjustment from earlier versions of Lightroom is present and accounted for, but now consolidated under one single Masking panel instead of three separate panels. The Select Sky option in Lightroom is practically a love letter to nature and landscape photographers. Whenever I sit down to edit a picture of grand prairies or sweeping vistas, one of the first things I do is create a mask for the sky so I can adjust exposure and white balance.

The Graduated filter had always been my preferred tool for this process, but it required a lot of fine-tuning with the Range Mask option and other manual adjustments. To use Select Sky, first navigate to a picture in the Develop module that contains a view of the sky. Then select the Masking tool, and click Select Sky. Lightroom will automatically analyze the image:. As with the Select Subject feature, you can change the color and opacity of the overlay, and you can perform additional edits, as well:.

This automatic process for selecting the sky offers a great starting point, and it will speed up your landscape editing like flooring the pedal on a Tesla Roadster. Regardless of whether you use computational tools like Select Subject and Select Sky or you prefer to create masks on your own without the help of algorithms and automated processes, the enhanced display tools will certainly make your life easier.

You can alter the opacity of the mask overlay by using a slider, which can help your mask stand out against a crowded foreground or background. You can also tell Lightroom to show the overlay color on the mask affected areas or on everything except the mask unaffected areas. Neither the opacity nor the overlay affects your edits, but they are incredibly useful to help you see where your edits are being applied. Showing an overlay color is nice, but what if you want to see only the mask?

Or only the unaffected areas? Or the mask against a black-and-white version of the image? You now have these options and more:. The Overlay Mode menu offers six choices for how your mask is displayed, and this is like manna from heaven for weary photo editors. None of these options change your edits, but instead give you a lot of useful visual information for seeing precisely where your mask is located on the image.

These overlay modes have the potential to truly transform your editing in Lightroom. Until now, the only tool at your disposal was a color overlay, but with the ability to see exactly where your mask is and is not applied, you can create masks that do exactly what you want. While you have always been able to add to and subtract from masks and filters in Lightroom, the new Masking tool makes this process easier than ever.

With the masking panel visible, choose Add or Subtract to adjust the mask area. I created an initial mask to lighten up the fly in the image below, but then I created another mask using Select Subject:. The results of the automatic Select Subject option were spot on, with two notable exceptions: the green protrusions on the top-left side of the leaf, and the brown leaf on the right. You can easily see this using the White On Black mask overlay:.

Fixing this issue is simple with the Subtract tool.