Selections and masks are subtly different, and the ‘parametric’ masks in non-destructive editors give more flexibility than ever.
Adjustment brush
A tool used to ‘paint’ adjustments on to an image manually, and one of the key adjustment tools in Lightroom, for example. It’s called an adjustment brush here, but it could just be called ‘brush’ in other programs, or ‘masking brush’. You can choose the adjustments you want to make, e.g. exposure, saturation, clarity and so on before you start painting, or make changes to these settings afterwards too.
Local adjustments explained
‘Local adjustments’ is a bit of a catch-all term. It means picking out an area of an image for adjustment while leaving the rest unchanged. So how do local adjustments work and which software does them best?
Rediscover dodging and burning in black and white
Back in the days of film, a ‘straight’ black and white print was only a stepping stone. A properly finished print was almost always enhanced with some skilled ‘dodging and burning’. Dodging and burning is a classic technique in black and white, where certain areas of a print are held back (dodged) under the enlarger […]
How to use the Lightroom adjustment brush tool to dodge and burn your colour shots
Dodging and burning was a standard darkroom technique for black and white photographers, but it works just as well on colour shots. ‘Dodging’ is where you lighten selected areas of the image and ‘burning’ is where you darken them. With the Lightroom adjustment brush tool this is really easy to do, and you can control […]