Blurring Backgrounds in Lightroom

I posted this tip a little over a year ago when Lightroom 3 came out, but I thought I'd post it again, since surprisingly it is one of my most-read posts. Looking to blur out a background to reduce distractions?  In Lightroom 3 or later, use the adjustment brush with Sharpness at -50 to -100.   [...]

2017-07-09T12:33:22-07:00August 1st, 2011|21 Comments

Using the HSL Panel to Work On Individual Colors

The HSL panel allows you to affect individual colors in your image.  HSL stands for Hue, Saturation, and Luminance. You can use Hue to shift a color towards another color, for example,  blue to purple or green.  (Yes, you too can have purple skies!)  Saturation is the intensity of color, so you can make your blues, for [...]

2017-07-09T12:35:40-07:00July 14th, 2011|1 Comment

Fixing Flash-Filled Animal Eyes in Lightroom

Recently a colleague of mine, Kathy Eyster, wrote an article in her award-winning blog, Essential Digital Camera, on how to fix flash-filled pet eyes using Photoshop.  The red-eye tool won’t fix them, as it simply takes red out, and pet pupils don’t turn red.  Kathy points out that there are two steps, first turning the pupil almost [...]

2017-07-09T12:38:57-07:00May 25th, 2011|14 Comments

Update: Inverting Your Images

Quite a while back I wrote about a technique to invert your images from negatives to positives or vice versa that involved an Adobe Camera Raw workaround.   In looking at my blog stats, I notice that people are still reading that post, so I thought I would provide an easier technique — now that Lightroom 3 [...]

2017-07-09T12:42:07-07:00August 12th, 2010|19 Comments

Video: Using the Adjustment Brush

I am working on a Lightroom 3 training DVD, which I will be offering for sale, hopefully soon.  The concept is a "Lightroom Workshop on DVD".  It is a series of many videos, several hours long in total, designed for beginning and intermediate Lightroom users.  I cover just about everything I teach in my two-day Lightroom [...]

2018-09-27T15:30:01-07:00July 28th, 2010|29 Comments

Lightroom 3: New Blur Brush and Filter

Looking to blur out a background to reduce distractions?  In Lightroom 3, use the adjustment brush with Sharpness at -100.   If this is not enough blur, do it again:  click on New to start a new adjustment, and paint a second time. Also consider using the graduated filter with -100 Sharpness to simulate a shallower [...]

2017-07-09T12:47:14-07:00June 20th, 2010|4 Comments

Wild Tone Curve Moves in Lightroom

I knew it wouldn’t be long before folks started creating wild presets with the new point tone curve in Lightroom 3 Beta 2. Here are SOME and SOME MORE from Jeffrey Friedl.  (UPDATE: This is applicable to later versions of Lightroom as well.) Play with it yourself: In the Tone Curve panel in the Develop module, [...]

2017-07-09T13:08:14-07:00April 1st, 2010|1 Comment

A Handy Curves Trick

Curves isn’t exactly intuitive, so Adobe lately has been introducing tools to make it more accessible.  As I mentioned in my “Introduction to Curves” post, the sliders available underneath the curve in Lightroom (and Camera Raw) to adjust brightness of Highlights, Lights, Darks and Shadows are one example of this.   Another example is the targeted adjustment [...]

2017-07-09T14:22:33-07:00January 29th, 2010|0 Comments
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