Video: Lightroom’s brush tool is an oft-forgotten but extremely powerful way to edit your images

 

 

Back when Nigel Danson shot with film, he spent a lot of time in the darkroom dodging and burning to brighten and darken parts of his prints selectively. Long before the days of Photoshop, there was a lot that photographers could do to edit their analog images by hand. With digital cameras and modern editing apps like Adobe Lightroom, tasks that used to be very difficult to perform in a darkroom are now extremely easy on a computer. One such tool is Lightroom's brush tool, an oft-forgotten tool in the age of sliders and AI-powered masks.

In the video below, Danson provides an in-depth tutorial on the brush tool, showing what it can do in your photo editing workflow. "This tool, the brush tool, is the most powerful tool in Lightroom, and it's the tool that I don't think photographers use enough," says Danson. You can selectively change textures, glow, the "feeling" of an image, and much more. Alongside the radial and graduated filter, the brush tool rounds out a very powerful suite of local adjustment tools.

What makes image editing apps such as Lightroom especially powerful is that there are many ways to achieve similar results. Photographers can pick and choose which tools they want to use, combine multiple tools, and cater their editing process to their preferences. While you can do a lot in Adobe Lightroom without touching the brush tool, Danson's video shows that it's an extremely powerful tool that could be useful in your workflow.

To see more from Nigel Danson, visit his website and YouTube channel. Follow Danson on Instagram to stay up to date with his most recent images.

(Via Nigel Danson)