By the time we’re through, you’ll be able to apply edits to specific areas of an image (like the subject or the background), specific tonal ranges (like the highlights, midtones, or shadows), or even specific colors (like the blues in a sky or the reds and oranges in skin). And we removed some distracting shadows below the subject to help simplify the frame.Īll of the tools we’re going to cover allow editors to carefully pick and choose parts of a photo to adjust. We made the subject a bit brighter while adding some sharpness and contrast to draw more attention to them. We added a dark-to-light gradient to the sky, without affecting the palm tree or the subject. If you look closely, you can see that we made a lot of adjustments, each to a particular part of the photo. Here is the before and after of the adjustments we made to our example image. This would allow you to get the most amount of detail out of the background, while still making sure the subject is the center of attention. For example, if you’re working with an outdoor portrait, you might want to make certain edits to only the subject, and certain edits to only the background. So what separates basic adjustments from the more advanced tools and features we’re covering today?Īs you get more familiar with Lightroom Classic, and with photo editing in general, you’ll find yourself wanting to make changes to specific areas of an image rather than the entire image as a whole.

We began the editing process in the last episode, covering some of the basic adjustments you can make in Lightroom.

Lightroom 4 graduated filter tutorial