New Adobe Lightroom 6: Graduated & Radial Filters meet the Adjustment Brush

Here we are covering what I consider being the most amazing feature of all. While the Radial Filter and Graduated filter aren’t new, Lightroom 6 has empowered them with an Adjustment Brush. This brush enables you to remove/reduce the effect of each filter which is a very powerful tool to have like in the example of my photograph of St Paul Cathedral in London.

Real life scenario

We start with the resulting HDR merge from the previous episode (New Adobe Lightroom 6: Intro & HDR merge):

We then apply a graduated filter to make the sky punchier, bluer and with the top part being darker than the bottom; hence using a graduated filter:

An interesting new feature that is worth mentioning is the mask overlay. This mask is not new per se, and appear by pressing the O letter on your keyboard. What is new is by pressing Shift + O you can then change its colour (Red, Green, White, Grey). This helps to see the mask better depending on the background colour of your photograph:

 

Here the obvious problem is the building is also covered by the graduated filter.

We then use the new Adjustment Brush inside the Grad Filter with the erase function to clear the filter effect of the building:

 

One has to be careful when using the erase feature as if you go too far and erase some part of the picture where you want the effect of the graduated filter; it is not possible to repair it by using the Brush A or B since one would loose the graduation. The Adjustment Brush inside the Graduated filter is not an other mean to create a graduation using a brush. It is a brush using the same parameters as the filter but in continuous. The interesting thing to also know about the erase function of the brush inside the filter (Radial or Graduated) is it marks a zone in your image, and that zone is not linked to the orientation of your filter. Therefore when you flip the Graduated filter vertically, you can see the effect of the erased area remains the same and is not rotated:

After hundreds of brush strokes to define the contour of the building below is what we achieve. While this development is not finished, I am sure you’d admit it is more compelling than the photograph we got right after the HDR merge.

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