Camera Raw Techniques: The Adjustment Brush
by Photographer Raymond Klass
The adjustment brush is a relatively new tool available in Camera Raw through both Photoshop and Adobe Lightroom. Make sure that your version of Camera Raw is updated to take advantage of this new and exciting tool for making selective corrections to your image. If you’re familiar with masking, this tool does a very similar job in a new, quick, and intuitive environment.
I’ve brought up an image from a recent trip to Banff National Park in Canada. The scene was shot at dusk, and a graduated neutral density filter was used to help bring both the sky and foreground into the camera’s dynamic range. With some simple raw adjustments (I set the exposure to -0.2), the image has an good histogram, and detail in both the sky and foreground are preserved.
Exposure wise, it’s not a bad image, but I think it would be a whole lot better if I could just darken the sky a bit, and lighten the grasses in the foreground a hair. The grasses were meant to be a first read - an initial place for the viewers eye to travel to. With them as dark as they are, and the sky so bright, I can’t help but go straight to the sky, and I think with some selective adjustments this image could really stand out.
