Adobe Lightroom – In Photos dot Org

Dodge and Burn using Lightroom Masks

It occurred to me while watching a video by Nick Page on Photoshop’s Luminosity masks that Lightroom Classic can now do something similar with luminance range masks. It’s not quite the same and won’t be as powerful, but it saves jumping to Photoshop and creating a 100MB tiff file.

You could always dodge and burn with the brush tool in Lightroom Classic, and by using a Brush Mask you can still do the same:

Create a brush mask.
Brush where you want to dodge or burn.
Adjust exposure.
Repeat for different exposures.

By using a luminance range mask in Lightroom Classic I could select the shades of dark or bright that I want to apply the effect to. By subtracting with a brush, I could modify the shape of the dodge/burn mask to my taste.

Sure enough, someone had done what I wanted already and had made a video of it. For a global dodge/burn, a change of .50 exposure can be a little too much, but that depends on your image.

For extra points, make an inverted sky mask and intersect with a luminance range mask to apply the dodge/burn there only, leaving your sky untouched.

And finally, make a preset of it! Click on the “+” next to Presets while editing and then “Create Preset…”. Uncheck everything and name your preset. Click on your dodge/burn masks in Masking, and click on “Support Amount Slider” in case you’ve modified that and save your new preset. New masks will be created when you apply the preset to another image. You can modify the intensity of the change to suit the new image.

If you’ve added an inverted sky mask, your preset will find the sky in any photo you apply the preset to everything but that part of the image.

The new masking tools in Lightroom Classic are very powerful. They’re really worth learning!

How to develop an underexposed photo in Lightroom

I had fun rescuing this really underexposed landscape photo in Lightroom.

It’s a photo of Kilcrea Friary in Co Cork and I went out there one September evening in 2015 with a few others from Blarney Photography Club to shoot the sunset. I remember the day was somewhat cloudy so I hoped there would be a magnificent backdrop of yellows and oranges to shoot the friary against. It was not to be. It was a solid mass of grey and darker grey. We took a number of photos from this side of the building, but for this shot I was experimenting and completely messed up the settings. It was a 61 second exposure but should have been almost twice that. Luckily I shoot in RAW so there was plenty of data for Lightroom to work with. This short video shows how I developed and rescued the photo.

I posted the photo of Kilcrea Friary last December. Here’s what the finished photo looks like.

This video was shot at the Automattic grand meetup of 2015. This is a gathering of everyone (or nearly everyone) who works at Automattic. All attendees have to give a short talk. Some people love public speaking, but most of us don’t, so this is the hardest part of the meetup for many. The talks are called “flash talks” because they have to be completed within a certain length of time. A few years ago it was five minutes and the limit wasn’t enforced, but because the company is so much bigger now the talk must be four minutes or less, with someone holding up a sign warning when you hit the three minute mark!

This one was filmed in Park City, Utah in the United States at an altitude of around 1,000m so the air is thinner and I hoped I wouldn’t run out of breath like I did the previous year. This time I had forgotten I was due to talk until about 5 minutes before and had to run halfway across the hotel to get my notes, running down stairs, up other stairs, sprinting along corridors and then back, doing the same. Finally seated in the conference room my bottle of water spilled it’s contents on to the carpet, my stress levels were rising and then it was my turn to give a flash talk. That was practically a relief after the hectic activity of the previous few minutes!

A few days later I gave an hour long workshop on Lightroom, sharing tips, tricks and techniques that improve the look and feel of photos. That was fun as I could go more slowly and into more detail explaining the various tools in the app.