Welcome back every body to the Lightroom 2 pod cast. My name is RC.

Let us talk a little bit about one of the best new features inside of the Lightroom 2. There is this feature right here in the develop panel. It is known as the corrective brush or the adjustment brush, keyboard shortcut K. Now, when we used this, think of it this way, in earlier versions of Lightroom, what used to happen was you used to have the option to be able to change clarity, exposure, saturation across the entire image but you did not have the option to be able to make these changes on a localized level.

That was something that you relied on Photoshop to be able to correct it for you. Not anymore. Lightroom does a great job of taking care all of this stuff right from inside itself so that you do not have to go to Photoshop all that often to be able to do this. Let me show you how it works.

The first thing we want to do before doing any thing is just fix this crap here so when you lose some you are just going to grab this sand and drag my line from my horizon, make sure it is straight at the end of the key. Now, this looks a little bit better.

Earlier or before, what I would do is I am just going to grab my exposure and change it. It does not look very good because it does the whole image. I do not want to do the whole image so instead what I am going to do is I am going to use my adjustment brush. I click on that and now notice that you get a variety of different things that you can do with this brush.

Now, the brush has a size and a feather and the flow much like it does in Photoshop. Notice that as I increase the size and decrease the size, there is a section where you have the overall size of the brush. The feather area is that outer circle that is on the brush. If I decrease the feather, see that circle comes in and out and then you have the option to be able to mask a specific area so it is just a little bit more intelligent as to how it works with doing the specific setting change.

In this case, what I want to do is I want to work with an exposure change. By doing an exposure change, what I am going to do is I am just going to send the setting that I want. In this case, let us just say that I have it at minus one or one point six will probably do.
I could go in there and just put in a setting. Let us just make this minus one.

Now, I have my brush. I have my size and again you can just kind of change this to where you would and other tools by just rolling up and down the mouse. I have this set and I will go ahead and I will just paint.

Notice that I am painting in a very specific area and I have a minus one exposure setup for this. What it is doing is it is taking the area that I have set and it is taking that in setting it up at some minus one. By doing that, I will go ahead and I will go ahead and brush this entire area and then I will let it go.

Once that is set, you will notice that you have a little pin right here. Watch this, I am just going to click on this brush and now I am done. What if I want to be able to see the changes that I have made?

I am going to click on the brush again and you will see the pin appears. If I hold over the pin or I just hover, it will show me an overlay. That overlay is telling you this is the area that you made an adjustment to highlight in red. That pin tells me that there is an effect of a hover over it. It tells me where I mean the effect.

Now, I can click right on that pin and drag to the left and to the right to make any kinds of changes that I need to make. Once I will let it go, you will notice that the change has been made. So, if I do it before, there is the old exposure that I had and then I do it after. There is the new exposure that I have.

It is a great way to be able to use it. You hover over the pin. It shows you the area, you can drag it here. You could also just click right on the pin and make the exposure adjustment here. Now, let us just say that I do not necessarily want an exposure. What I want is the saturation adjustment.

I can click on the drop down here and I can select something else. Let us just say clarity, for example. Now, that adjustment is on that same area. If I hover over the pin you will see the effect but now what I am doing is I am doing clarity.

What I will do is can drop the clarity or increase the clarity for this image. Notice as I drop the clarity, it kind of gets that more ethereal look. As I increase the clarity, what it is going to do is it is going to sharpen that section a little bit up so it punches these clouds out.

Once we do that, I could even make these changes so that instead of exposure or clarity, it turns as we brighten this. Notice now, really, really dark. I can turn around and grab this slider and drag it over to the right and now it takes care of that adjustment from a brightness template.

Some people like exposure, some people like brightness, it is all six or one-half of this than the other so you have to kind of play around with it but notice it does not keep the settings of the other one so all you are doing here is you still have the same mask area. You are not layering on top of one another. All you are doing is you are using that same area and instead of doing brightness you are doing exposure or instead of using exposure, you are doing clarity.

In the next pod cast, we will talk a little bit about some of the other settings that we have here. We will also talk about how to be able to take the settings and put them on top of one another like creating more points in this image.

My name is RC. Thanks for watching.