On Mon, Sep 3, 2012 at 11:41 PM, Boris Liberman <[email protected]> wrote: > > On 9/3/2012 5:00 PM, Bruce Walker wrote: >> >> Boris, you can do a hell of a lot with Lr gradients, adjustment >> brushes, etc. You are much less limited than you may think. Just >> requires the time to play with these tools. > > I know. I use gradients very often to correct exposure locally (usually > towards the frame corners) and to correct contrast, etc. [...] > > I don't like adjustment brushes and use them only to correct things such > as extremely overblown or contrasty areas. It is because I don't have the > precise pointing input device such as pen or whatever and with the mouse I > can hardly do it in a way that is printable afterwards. On the small web > size image it would look ok, but at bigger sizes - no go. > > Of course with enough practice and repetitions I might be able to do it, > but honestly - I am too lazy for that.
Boris, I don't have a pen tablet (yet) either, and I employ adjustment brushes extensively just using my mouse. There's a little trick to doing this easily in a controlled way, and it involves reducing the Flow and "scrubbing" over the affected areas. Example: let's say you need to boost the exposure on somebody's face, just a teensy bit to being them out of shadow. You don't want them to look like you shone a hard-edged spotlight on their face. Select the Adjustment Brush, make sure that all the Effect sliders are zero (hint: double-click on a slider's name to zero it), push the Exposure right to its maximum setting, which is 4. (I know; bear with me.) Go down to the Brush settings: - set Feather to 100 - set Flow to 30 - untick Auto Mask - I have Density set to 50, but I don't think it matters here. - set the brush Size appropriately for the area you are going to adjust. Eg: for a face choose a diameter about half the width of the face. Now, move the mouse over the area you want to brighten. The cursor will show you the absolute outer boundary of the circular gradient plus a circle about half that diameter. Keep your eye on where the inner half-size circle is, and keeping it inside the face, click and start painting (brushing) over the face; zig-zag or in circles, either is fine. Don't fret if you colour a little outside the boundary. :-) With Flow selected to be a fraction, eg 20 to 30, you will only get a little bit of the effect on each pass. As you brush over areas you have already hit you'll see the exposure increase, a bit at a time, in a nice even, controlled manner. If you need to increase a particular area more, you can scrub the brush back and forth just in that area, like painting. You can adjust the brush diameter on the fly by twiddling your mouse's scroll wheel, if it has one. Or you can use the square brackets: [ - smaller, ] - larger. Doing this will get you nice subtle control with almost invisible transitions. Cheers! -- -bmw -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
