LIghtroom Adjustment Brush Presets

The above picture is of a young mom and her baby that I was privileges to be a part of a special moment in their life. Baby pictures are once in a lifetime moment and they change daily. Snapshots are so important to them memories of the parents during their child's development. The child will not remember expect for the images being shown on a graduation slideshow or to a girlfriend and the final insult is during the wedding reception video.

While snapshots are so important, professionally taken and processed images are more than just a moment in development, they are pieces of art that can should be hung on a wall.

During this particular shoot we were at the moms house. so I had to get portable. I used a Westcott black and white collapsable backdrop, a Lastolite EZbox, two Canon 580EX II speedlites mounted to PocketWizard Flex TT5 receivers. On the Canon 5D Mk II was mounted an EF 70-200 f/2.8 L IS lens and the PocketWizard Flex TT1 transmitter on the shoe. All good intentions aside, I forgot a reflector so  we used a white pillow case for some of the shots which worked out well for fill. I went to the other flash unit as a hair/fill light about half way though the shoot. For that I set it to manual and dropped it down to 1/3 power which worked just right. Of course the image did not come out of the camera looking like it dies above and that is what this post is all about.

Lightroom has develop presets as well as the ability to make your own, or purchase preset. Those presets can even be used in the Library Module as well as during the import process (very handy BTW). One of the little secrets to Lightroom is there are many other locations to save settings. One such location is in the adjustment brush.

Just under the "Mask:" in the screenshot is the word "Effect". This field has a drop down box to select different brush presets to be used. As you can see, I have selected Skin Softening Mild which is one I saved a while back. It drops the sharpness all the way down and reduces the Clarity some. 

As you can see in the drop down menu, I have a Medium and Max version of the same. On the opening image I used the Max version as I wanted to get the effect of full foundation on the moms face. I used the Mild version for the baby's face.

Here is the original image out of the camera with the Canon Faithful profile added at import (remember the import presets) to all the images as a starting point. What used to take gobs of time in Photoshop using layers, masks, and plugins, can all be done in Lightroom now. It still takes time to get an artistic image but a salable image is just minutes away from import now.

Take care all... Doug