How to Use the Brush and Gradient Safely
I was very happy with the photos I took of the shored sailboat at Cedar Key except for one tiny problem: the foreground was darker than that brightly lit sky. Once I could get the other processing squared away, I decided to pull out the brush and gradient to take care of that.
See? Here’s the original:
The processing was pretty boring up to that point, but just for clarification, I’m going to include those steps here as well. I changed the white balance to a slightly warmer tone, as you may see below (but it’s honestly a pretty tiny change, and I couldn’t see that much difference myself):
Next up in Lightroom’s right menu is the basic tone – the Exposure, Recovery, Fill Light, Blacks, Brightness, and Contrast. Those had some of my standard fiddling: pushing the exposure a bit, pushing the recovery for those rather bright whites in the clouds, increasing the blacks. As a result, contrast and brightness pretty much didn’t get touched.
My tone curves are never “S”-shaped, and this one wasn’t either. For reference, my highlights were at -26, my Lights at +36, my Darks at -12, and my Shadows at -44. Definitely not your standard, but it seemed to work for this photo.
Next was the color. Based on the calibration, the colors are going to look pretty funny, but once the calibration comes into play, everything should make sense.
There was a bit of split-toning and a LOT of vignetting added (which definitely seems counterintuitive, but bear with me):
Next up is that promised calibration step. A desaturation of the green channel and a push of the blue channel toward purple results in blues that look normal again:
Now the scene is set for our other tools.
First, we’re going to do a gradient just along the bottom half of the photo where the sand is. You can change any of the values of the gradients and brushes, but in this instance, all we really need is to increase the exposure by +.70.
Now we can actually see all of that section of the sand that has the shell, but the vignette still adds drama to the sky.
I’m not especially keen on that dull brown color, though, so I wanted to add the brown back in there. But I still wanted that shell to retain its original color. This is where the brush comes into play.
First, I need to tell the brush what to DO. I want to bring up the color that’s already there, so I push the saturation to +100. It turns out that that color is kind of green, so to balance that, I’m going to add a color that’s peachy. The two mixed together is going to make that gold color that you’ll see in the final product.
There are quite a few options that you have when you choose the brush. You have to choose the size of the brush, the feathering, and the opacity. This job is fairly straight-forward; I need to cover a pretty big area, so I’m going to choose a fairly large size (18.1). I don’t want to feather too much, but I don’t want a hard edge where the horizon meets the sky or water, so I’m going to choose a value of 30 for the feathering. When I actually get to that point, I’m going to zoom in so I can carefully determine where the lines end. And as for opacity (or “flow” as Lightroom calls it, but as a girl I find this kind of icky), I’m going to go with 60. The more times I move the brush over the area, the more opaque the “mask” (or the covered area) will be – one pass over it will result in 60% opacity, whereas a couple of times over it will result in something more like 100% opacity. This will just help me control that part in the middle that I still want to reflect the colors of the sky.
So I paint over that entire bottom section, making sure to leave the middle somewhat transparent (the red areas indicate what was painted – NOT how the photo is going to look once my settings are applied):
But I don’t want my shell to be that gold color, so I’m going to choose “Erase” and change the brush settings and zoom in REALLY close (like 4:1) and carefully erase the mask from the shell:
Once I’m done erasing that section, my mask is going to look like this (note the hole in the red where the shell is):
And then once I click the brush icon again to leave the brush mode, I see my final result:
