- One of the easiest ways to keep your retouching
looking believable and realistic is to limit how fast
the effect of the brush that you're painting
is actually being applied to your image,
and that stuff can all be modified in the brush settings.
So I want to take a little bit of time
to show you some of those settings
and how they can make you work smarter, not harder.
So when it comes to the local adjustment brush,
there are a few settings that I would like
to just bring to your attention.
You have the option to have two different brushes visible,
two different brush presets at the same time.
So usually with brush A, what I like to do
is have a large brush that has a very high feather
and maybe a decreased flow, and density can be
all the way up because I'm decreasing the flow.
That's going to be my nice soft brush,
if I'm trying to do something general
and I don't want brushstrokes, but then when it comes
to brush B, you can see that I've made some changes.
This is the way I like to keep my brush B, very, very small.
This is my eyelash brush, that I call it,
and I'm going to show you guys how to make eyelashes later.
It's extremely small and all of the settings
are all the way up, so that's how I use my brush B preset.
So usually I'm on A, but if I need to quickly
go in and do something very specific with almost
a line precision, that's when I'm using my brush B.
You also have the option to erase from your selection,
and when you hold down the option or alt key,
that is actually what's going to erase
from a selection that you've created,
and whatever your settings are are,
that's what's going to erase for that specific brush.
Okay, so as you can see here
I'm holding down option or alt and I'm erasing
from my original squiggly line mask over here on the left
so that we can see the difference from the before
and the after of the mask.
So a lot of people will ask me,
what's the difference between feather, flow, and density?
So when we're dealing with feather,
it's just basically how sharp is the edge
around where the brush is?
So when we have a brush that's very, very, very big
that has a very harsh line around it,
You know that the feather is going to be
quite at a low percentage because you can actually
see the line around the area that we painted.
So if we take that feather and we take it all the way up,
it's basically blurring the area from where it has
been painted to where hasn't been painted.
So if I go ahead and click once here,
you can see that, very different to our original area
with the very sharp line, that you can
almost not even see the transition line
around this specific spot right there.
So again, we've got a very harsh line
which is a low feather integer,
and then we have a very soft line,
which is a high feather integer.
I want to talk a little bit about
the difference between density and flow.
And for that, I want to zoom in and use
the area of the white brick for this example.
If I pull my flow all the way down and I go ahead and paint,
even though my exposure slider is at negative four,
so negative four stops and I paint and I paint and I paint,
it's very slowly painting in that darkening effect.
So it's going to take me an extremely long time
to get to a negative four exposure darkening
if I have such a low flow.
And if I go ahead and increase that flow
and then I'm going to paint right below it
at a hundred percent flow, and I'm darkening the effect
to negative four right underneath it,
you can see how immediately it comes out of the brush.
That's the difference between flow.
They're both going to get to a hundred percent.
It's just how long it takes you to get
to a hundred percent visibility.
So think about a bucket under a faucet.
If you just open the tap of the faucet
a slight little drip, it's going to take you
an extremely long time to fill up that bucket.
But if you open up your tap completely,
it's going to take a much shorter amount of time
to fill up that bucket to a hundred percent fullness, right?
So that's the difference between flow.
Now, density is the final visibility
and opacity of the brush.
So if you take the density all the way down,
it doesn't matter how long you paint.
You're never going to get higher than 13% visibility,
or opacity as we're used to in Photoshop.
So that's going to be the difference
between feather, flow, and density.
If I pull this density all the way up and I do the same,
you can see it immediately goes
all the way to a hundred percent.
So this is basically like your cap.
Your density is your visibility cap at all times.
I rarely use the density slider
and I always keep it at a hundred percent.
Instead. What I like to use
is I like to really vary the flow
and use that so that I protect
and keep my retouching looking realistic.
The last thing that I'd like to point out to you guys
for the settings and all of that kind of thing,
is this little icon here.
You can see there's a tiny little brush symbol
and we can see that the reason why
it's a little tiny brush symbol is because
each one of the selection methods that we have
within the masking options has a different icon.
And so once that icon goes inactive,
it's very similar to pinpoints,
the way pinpoints used to be.
Once that icon is active it's going to have
a tiny little icon of what was used
to create that specific mask.
And then once it's off, hitting return key,
it goes inactive and you can see
this little, tiny little tab.
But if you right click on this tiny little thing,
you can have a lot of different options here.
So you can, for example, you can invert your entire mask.
So all of a sudden, all of that darkening
is visible where we didn't paint
instead of where we did paint.
So I'm going to go ahead and hit invert
and turn that off again.
But you can also choose to duplicate this brush,
and then we can click and drag and rotate
all of those modifications to a different part in the image.
This is great for when you are adding lashes in Lightroom,
because you can add lashes on one side
or you can add something here and then you can
duplicate it and add it somewhere else.
So if you're darkening one specific cloud,
you can then duplicate that adjustment
and add it to a different cloud.
The other thing that we can do is by right-clicking
on this, we can choose to delete this brush.
And then also just hitting the delete key
on the keyboard with this local modification active
will also delete that brush as well.
And those are some of the brush characteristics
and how we use the brush tool inside the new masking panel.