Lightroom Adjustment Brush Presets

by Michael Hoffman

The introduction of the Local Adjustment Brush back in Lightroom 2 was the first step in transforming Lightroom from a global editor to a fully parametric, flexible content enhancement editor. The adjustment brush capabilities have improved with every release of Lightroom since then, but you may not have been aware of the existence of Adjustment Brush Presets. Adjustment Brush parameters can be set and reset at will, but Lightroom allows you to save specific settings together as an Adjustment Brush Preset. These presets may help you to speed your work and to operate more efficiently, especially in cases where you may be performing similar edits across many images. Check out the video for tips on using, creating and managing Adjustment Brush Presets. Lightroom Adjustment Brush Presets are not as powerful and flexible as their Photoshop brush cousins, but they are still quite useful. Keep in mind the main limitation of the Adjustment Brush Presets:

Adjustment Brush Presets store develop parameters only!

The Adjustment Brush Presets don’t contain brush tip parameters such as size, density, flow or feather. Furthermore, the actual shape of the area you have brushed on your image isn’t stored in the preset. With those limitations in mind, you’re ready to begin to use and create Lightroom Adjustment Brush Presets, as demonstrated here in the video. If you want to see more creative tips, check out my video on Lightroom adjustment brush tricks.

 

First published at TipSquirrel.com

Lightroom Mobile Quick Setup Guide

Originally posted at TipSquirrel.com 

Photoshop Nut : Michael Hoffman 

As you may have noticed, Adobe has just released Lightroom 5.4, along with the new Lightroom Mobile for iPad. Lightroom mobile extends your workflow beyond the desktop, and onto your iPad, where you can review, rate and even edit your images, and have the changes synchronized automatically back to your main catalog.

Lightroom uses the Creative Cloud storage services as the hub for this synchronization, and as a result, you must be a member of one of the subscription services for this to work, including any of the Creative Cloud plans, or the Photoshop Photography Program.

The iPad app is completely free, so this is just another benefit of the Creative Cloud subscription. Lightroom Mobile uses Collections as the basis for synchronization, so make sure you are familiar with using Collections in Lightroom to support this workflow.

Setting up Lightroom Mobile isn’t very difficult, but there are a few things that must be done in the proper sequence for it to work. Let’s step through the basics of getting things rolling.

First, download the new programs

You’ll need to download and install the new update for Lightroom 5.4 for your desktop. You can find it here:

• Lightroom 5.4 Update for Windows
• Lightroom 5.4 Update for Mac

You’ll also want to download Lightroom Mobile for iPad. You can find it here:

• Lightroom Mobile for iPad

Once you’ve completed the downloads, you’re ready to move on.

Next, configure Lightroom on the Desktop

When you start Lightroom 5.4, you’ll notice a change where the Identity plate used to be. Now, there’s a new identity section with a place for you to configure your settings with Lightroom Mobile.

Clicking the link to “Get started with Lightroom mobile” beings up a menu with a selection to enable you to sign in with your Adobe ID:

 



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Quick Tip: Reduce Digital Noise with Photoshop

Originally posted at TipSquirrel.com 

Photoshop Nut : Janine Smith

Q: How do I Get Rid of Digital Noise?

A: Have you ever had an image that has bits of color in it that clearly shouldn’t be there? I suppose there are all sorts of reasons they may be there (High ISO, low light…), but all some people care about is that they’re there and they want them to go away! When you see a big splotch of red on a blue shirt, it seems the simple thing to do is to do a Hue / Saturation adjustment, use the dropper to select the red and change the hue and saturation until you have a better match, but the truth is if you do that, the selection won’t be red, it’ll be the same color as the color the splotch is on, or blue. So no go on that. Besides, getting the colors to match, even somewhat, would be a pain, especially if you had a lot of photos taken at the same time, in the same conditions. So, the bad news is you can’t make them just easily go away. You can reduce them, though, and do it pretty fast, too.

 Here’s a close up example of a blue shirt with digital noise:

Splotch blast! Now to reduce the splotch: Start by making a duplicate of the background layer. Change the Layer Blend Mode of this duplicate layer to Color.

 

 Now go to Filter > Blur >

Gaussian Blur; start moving the slider over to the right. Don’t pay attention to the preview window, which will begin to blur, rather watch the image itself, which is not blurring, but the colored noise is seemingly fading away.

You’ll know you’re going too far when the image starts to desaturate.

Mask out the areas surrounding the parts where you reduce the noise. There might still be some flaws, but it could be that the remaining flaws are preferable to the splotch!

Coloring with Photoshop – Skin

Originally posted at TipSquirrel.com 

Photoshop Nut : Janine Smith

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We’re going to perk things up a bit with a little help from history. First, we need to ask ourselves a couple of questions; what era is our image from and what era’s style do we want to borrow from? Of course, you can color your images any way you like, but personally, I like to borrow styles from the era the image was taken in. For the really old images that may mean striving for a watercolor or pastel look of a hand tinted image and portraits taken in the 40’s may call for the more saturated, glamorous style of that era. I’ll go more into the styles of each era and inspiration at a later date, but for now, since the image I’m working on was taken in the 40’s, you can go online and find an image or images from that era that appeals to you in terms of skin and hair color. You may feel like it’s wrong to borrow an image, but It’s okay to use these images for this purpose – all you’re going to do is sample color palettes, you’re not using the image or reproducing it in any other way. I liked the skin tones in this image of Rita Hayworth so I sampled some of the colors"

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Hand Painted Border Brushes For Photoshop

Originally posted at TipSquirrel.com 
Photoshop Nut : Gavin Hoey


I’m a sucker for a border and Photoshop has a raft of ways in which you can create a border from scratch. The only downside with some Photoshop border effects is they can look digitally created and by that I mean they lack the subtle changes and randomness that only a handmade border provides. So here’s a solution. Paint your own borders and turn them into custom brushes. Since Photoshop CS6 brushes can be up to 5000 pixels long, twice the size of Photoshop CS5 and that opens up a lot more creative possibilities. To get you started we’re sharing the same brush image that you’ll see used in this video. All you need to do is download it.

Click here to get the FREE brush set.

This will take you to TipSquirrel.com where we'll ask you to Tweet, Plus or post to LinkedIn to reveal the brushes. This is marketing, not blackmail; ;)

Originally posted at TipSquirrel.com 
Photoshop Nut : Howard Pinsky

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Many Photoshop users have asked how they would be able to add multiple Strokes, or outlines, to an object. This quick tip will show you how it's possible to add 6 outlines to a single object, using Layer Styles, and a new feature in Photoshop CS6. Starting out, you need a shape. I'm using a simple star shape that comes with Photoshop's Custom Shapes Tool.


 

 

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Selecting Hair in Photoshop Touch

Originally posted at TipSquirrel.com 
Photoshop Nut : Eric Renno


Selecting hair is one of the more challenging Photoshop skills if you want to start doing compositing. Photoshop Touch makes it very easy to do, on the go, using a couple of tools and a filter. In this video I take the photo of Paige and extract her, fly away hair included, and put her on a grungy background.    

The Photoshop Show 27 - With Guest Eric Renno

In this edition of The Photoshop Show TipSquirrel Nut Eric Renno is the special guest. More editions of this great show can be found here.

"A bi-weekly web broadcast hangout show. Your hosts Jan Kabili and Ron Clifford along with a featured guest with a specialty in Photoshop and Lightroom, discuss and demonstrate post processing features and techniques and the inspiration behind the art. This show is geared toward beginner and intermediate Photoshop and Lightroom users, though many advanced techniques are also covered."

Step Into Your Image with Photoshop and After Effects

Originally posted at TipSquirrel.com
Photoshop Nut : Eric Renno

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In this video I take a flat, 2D image and transform it into a 3D image that a camera can pass into. If you’ve not worked with Vanishing Point before then you may wish to take a quick look at Multiple Planes with Photoshop (No 3D Layers). There’s two techniques here, one uses only Photoshop while the second uses Photoshop and After Effects. 

Conditional Actions in Photoshop

Originally posted at TipSquirrel.com
Photoshop Nut : Richard Hales

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The latest update to Photoshop (only available to Creative Cloud users, don’t blame me talk to Adobe, but I probably agree with you) included something called Conditional Actions.  Conditional Actions are a way of adding a clause to an action that will cause another action to run if the clause is applicable or another to run if it isn’t.  Clear?  No, probably not, so I’ll create a real world example to explain more clearly (hopefully).   One thing I end up doing a lot is preparing images for tutorials, this involves using the Save For Web function in Photoshop, in-putting size and quality settings, selecting a place to save the image and then close without saving.  I have two actions to do this for me, one for landscape and square images (the square action works with portrait images too), which means running a Batch command for several images would have been a fiddle and a faff. What Conditional Actions allow me to do is to create a new action that selects which of my two existing actions to run depending on whether the image is landscape or square/portrait.   To do this, open the Actions palette and create a new action (press the new icon at the bottom of the palette or use the palette's pop out menu)

    

Name it as you wish but make sure that you save the action the set where the actions you are going to use are located.  Don’t worry about pressing record as you do not need to be recording to create a Conditional.   Go back to the pop out menu and click on “Insert Conditional…”   opens the Conditional Action dialogue box

 

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Image Variations with Photoshop Gradient Maps

Originally posted at TipSquirrel.com
Photoshop Nut : Michael Hoffman

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If you look in Photoshop’s Adjustments Panel, right at the very bottom, in the last position, there is the really technical sounding “Gradient Map.” If you haven’t seen this adjustment in action, or known what it can do, you’d be entirely likely to pass right over it – it sounds complicated. But, it isn't  Gradient Maps are one of the simplest ways of toning or tinting an image. In fact, if you like to tinker with your image, searching for a certain “look,” the Gradient Map can provide a seemingly endless train of color variations, all with a few clicks. Let’s see how it works.

 We’ll start with the image above, and very quickly, we can open the Adjustments Panel and click Gradient Map (Or, if you prefer menus, Image > Adjustments > Gradient Map… will get you there). The adjustment layer is added, and the Property Panel opens, showing the gradient picker and controls:

 

At this point, the default gradient is applied to your image, in a very predictable way. Looking at the gradient from left to right, the colors on the left are applied to the darkest tones in your image, and the colors on the right are applied to the lightest tones – with the tones in the gradient “mapped” to the highlights and shadows of the image. With the default black and white gradient, this gives us a black and white image, like so:

 

 Now, this in itself isn’t really amazing or surprising – after all, there are dozens of ways to get a grayscale image within Photoshop. No, the variations come as we change the gradient, which is mapped to the image tones. We can click the drop down arrow next to the gradient and pick a different gradient (such as Copper), which is mapped onto the image tones the same way:

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From The TipSquirrel.com Archive : Shooting Tethered in Lightroom

Originally posted at TipSquirrel.com
Photoshop Nut : Scot Baston

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One of the fantastic things about Lightroom is the way it can streamline a photographer's workflow. Lightroom allows the creating of presets and applying them over a complete shoot, even applying those presets on import ( see my previous tutorial). These can save hours of boring, time consuming, repetitive post production that benefits neither the client or the photographer. Recently I had to shoot a series of product shots for a client, each shot would be set up exactly the same and would require the same post processing. Now using presets I could shoot all of the images, import them into Lightroom and apply a preset to all of the images, but the finished images could not be reviewed until the shoot was complete. This might mean going back and reshooting which would be time consuming and expensive. Shooting Tethered A better way would be to shoot tethered in Lightroom. For those that don't know, shooting tethered is having your computer (and Lightroom) connected directly to your camera during the shoot. No more looking at the back of the camera and trying to figure out if the images are in focus, no more massive upload at the end of a shoot, and much less guesswork as to the look of the final image. Most DLSR's today have the ability to shoot tethered using a simple USB cable connected to both the camera and your computer. In my example I had my camera set up on a tripod directly above my studio setup and a USB cable connecting the camera to my laptop & Lightroom.

Setting up Lightroom for shooting tethered

 

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From The TipSquirrel.com Archive : Getting Started in HDR Pro

Originally posted at TipSquirrel.com
Photoshop Nut : Richard Harrington

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In this exclusive video for TipSquirrel.com Rich Harrington show’s us how to get our images into HDR Pro and what to do with them once they’re there!      

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