- Anyone that has watched any of my courses
about retouching in Lightroom
knows how much I'm in love with the Local Adjustment Brush.
I know I'm geeking out here, but it's the truth,
it's my favorite brush.
And the reason why is because it allows you to do
90% of the work that you need to do,
all in Lightroom specifically,
you don't have to go to Photoshop.
I have a mantra that I live by
when it comes to my retouching,
90% of what you do can be done by changing a pixel's color,
or changing its brightness/darkness value.
And the Local Adjustment Brush allows you
to do those two things with lots of ease.
So let me show you what I'm talking about.
So thanks our new masking icon that we have here,
our Brush Tool is actually missing from our tools area,
as per previous versions of Lightroom.
So it is actually a little bit hidden and hard to find.
If we go ahead and click on our Masking Tool,
you can see that here is where the Brush Tool shows up.
Another easy way to access the Brush Tool
is to hit K on your keyboard,
which is immediately going to create a mask for you.
And it has your Brush Tool activated, which is very helpful.
So K on your keyboard is an easy way to create a mask,
very quickly using the Brush Tool.
The reason why this tool is my absolute favorite tool to use
is because we have so many different options and sliders
and different settings that we can apply to our brushed area
with one swipe of our mouse or our tablet or our pen.
So that's why this tool is extremely powerful in my opinion.
So what exactly is the difference
between a local adjustment and a global adjustment?
Let me go ahead and pull the exposure
all the way down first.
And if I wanted to pull the exposure
all the way down to -4.0, and then I draw,
you can see that the darkening effect
is only over where I've drawn on this mask.
But conversely, if I wanted to decrease the exposure
over the entire image instead of using the brush,
which is more localized,
I can go ahead and close out my masking.
I can come to my Global Exposure Slider
and pull the exposure all the way to -5 globally.
So let's go ahead and double click the word Exposure
to bring us back.
So you can see here, this is a local change,
a local modification, and that was done by the brush,
that is a local adjustment.
But if we wanted to create a global adjustment,
we're just going to affect the entire image.
And that's the difference
between a local adjustment and a global adjustment.