Isolation Using Lightroom’s Radial Filter And Brush

Today’s image is another from a photowalk in the New York Botanical Garden (NYBG).  It was the end of the day (for us at least) and we were just hanging out by an artificial lily pond.  I judge a fair number of photo competitions during a given year and one thing I typically harp on is changing your angle of view.  Too many people enter images taken from their standing height.  If I get one to comment on I’ll suggest the person go back to the same place (or a similar situation) and move around.  Stand on a chair, squat down, go up to the second floor if there is one, put the camera down on the ground, anything.  Just don’t stand there and shoot from five feet high.  Well, at the NYBG I certainly took my own advice.  I was laying flat on my belly, looking like the aftermath of a criminal assault  or something.  The friends I was with got a kick out of what I’d do to get a shot.  Obviously today’s image is not a full frame.  It’s wildly cropped to isolate and increase the “focus” on the flowers.  It see how Adobe Photoshop Lightroom (LR) helped draw attention to the flowers, hit the “Read More”.

The Radial Filter has been around for a while in LR, but until the latest iterations there’s been no way to modify the oval/circular shape of what you could do with it.  Now Adobe has added a Brush feature to a couple of the LR tools.  The Radial Filter and the Graduated Filter come to mind.  The options are now New, Edit and Brush.  As in the last post the typical way to use the Brush is to add to what ever you’re working on.  With the Dehaze tool (see the last post) the “normal setting” is centered.  Push the slider to the right and you decrease the haze in an image.  Push to the left and you’ll add haze.  With the Radial Filter (or the Graduated Filter) you can hold down the ALT key and turn the Brush tool into a negative.  This let’s you take away from what you’ve just done.

In today’s image there’s probably fifteen Radial Filter Pins dropped in various spots.  Each cluster of pedals got it’s own pin.  Each pedal in some cases got it’s own pin.  There were overall pins and detail pins.  Without being able to hid the Pins (H) I wouldn’t have been able to get to the level of detail I was interested in. 

Since the pedals are pointed and the Filter is (at best) a narrow oval, the two shapes didn’t match up.  Now, with the Brush involved in the Radial Filter I could go in and sculpt each shape to closely match what was actually in the image by holding down the ALT key as I brushed away stray flares and overshoots. 

Adobe is constantly adding new features to LR and the addition of the Brush feature in the tools is a big help.