Hello, I'm Helen Bradley.
Welcome to this video tutorial.
In this tutorial I'm going to show you how you can add light to an image using the new
Radial filter in Lightroom 5.
Before we get started on this tutorial let's have a look and see what it is that we're
trying to achieve.
This is a statute that was in an exhibition in Sidney and this is the original image and
if you have a look you can see that the statute is actually sitting on a table.
And what I want to do is actually to draw attention to the horse but without all this
extraneous stuff behind it.
So let's just take the Exposure back and let's have a look and see what we're aiming for.
This is the edited image and it's been edited using the new Radial filter tool in Lightroom
and the Radial filter is going to work really well for us in this situation because what
we want to do is to bring in some detail in this area of the image but keep the rest of
the image really quite dark.
So let's see how we would achieve this.
I'm going to start by doing a White Balance adjustment on this image and I've got a sort
of blown out white here that is a pretty good place for me to actually white balance to.
And I want to warm it up just a little bit beyond that.
I'm going to increase the Exposure a little bit but you can see that when I do so all
this area behind the horse starts to become really obvious and that's not what I want.
So I'm going to drag on the blacks to try and darken that area.
Of course that's going to have a bit of an effect on the horse as well.
I can now adjust Highlights.
I want to keep my Shadows again pretty dark because the last thing I want to do is to
bring too much detail out of that shadow area and I'll also just play with the whites a
little bit.
I might add a little bit of Clarity just to add a little bit of sharpness to the image
but again I really want to keep these blacks and shadows really quite dark to make it look
like the horse is almost floating.
Having done this I'm now going to bring in my Radial filter and this is the new Radial
filter tool in Lightroom.
Click on it to select it and then drag to draw your radial filter.
Now it's a circle or an oval just depending on how you shape it and I want mine to be
a sort of oval.
Right now it's way off the top of the image but that's not a problem.
I'm just going to drag it into position and it has these sizing handles so I can drag
to resize it.
Drag on the center to position it where I want it to and if I wanted to I could also
rotate it.
So if that made sense I could do so.
Well, I might rotate it a little bit in this situation.
Once I've done that I can now control what this effects.
Now if I add the Exposure I'm just going to do that so that you can see exactly what's
happening here is that the Radial filter is actually what we're doing is we're affecting
the area outside the oval here not inside it.
And to affect the area inside I'm just going to click here to invert the mask so now I'm
affecting the area inside not outside.
I want a pretty nice feather on it so I'm going to make sure I have a fairly larger
feather and obviously that Exposure adjustment was not really what I wanted.
I wanted a little bit more highly exposed but not a whole lot.
And now I can start fiddling with these other options.
I can smooth out the image by removing Noise in it.
I can add Sharpness if I want to or remove Sharpness.
I can increase Saturation.
What I can do also in this sort of oval area is I can add a color.
So I'm just going to go for a slightly warm color sort of pinky orange here and just add
that in to that area making sure that I don't bring in any of the unwanted background.
And then I can click Done.
And that's pretty much the same result as I got here only I look like I've exposed this
one a little bit too highly.
So again if I want to readjust this I can just come back into the Radial filter tool
because there is a Radial filter on this mage and what I want to do is make sure it's selected
and then select the pin because this is the pin that is indicating where this Radial filter
is.
I've got Show Pins set to Always.
I just find it a whole lot easier.
And if that was too much I can just back off the Exposure on that and click Done.
So this is the image that we just fixed and it's been done with a Radial filter which
allows us to apply a change to the image either in the center of the image or around the outside.
So we could use it around the outside of the image.
Let's just find something that we could use it with.
Let's have a look at this image here.
I'm just going to bring in the crop on this image and I would obviously fix it.
It's not nearly where I would want it to be but let's just call that done and what I could
do is to bring in a Radial filter to add a vignette, perhaps an off-center vignette.
So here I'm going to add a fairly large Radial filter.
In this case I don't want it to be inverted because I want to affect the area outside
the mask and I'm going to bring the Exposure down so that we could actually create quite
a little Vignette effect where the inside of the image or the inside of this Radial
filter is nicely exposed and the outside has reduced saturation for example, reduced exposure,
reduced brightness.
Now these sliders are a little different because I'm working with an image that appears to
be an older process version.
You can see that it's process version 2010.
If I update it to 2012 these sliders are going to change.
So let's just go and update this one to 2012 and here are the 2012 sliders for this Radial
filter.
You'll still get it if you're processing images that were processed with an early version
of Lightroom's Process tool but you won't get quite the same tools within the Radial
filter that are accessible to you.
Now if you want to affect the outside of the image differently to the inside just leave
this filter here and go and add a new one and add a new one pretty much on top of where
you added the old one.
This time I'll invert it so this time instead of affecting the outside I'm affecting the
inside.
So let's do a Clarity and Saturation boost on the inside of this image so that we're
getting some different effect on the inside of this Radial filter to what we had on the
outside.
And I'll click Done.
So now we've got two Radial filters affecting this image, one affecting the inside of the
Radial filter to get a brighter more contrasty effect and then the one affecting the outside
that's giving us that sort of Vignette effect.
Radial filters are a really handy addition to Lightroom.
I think you're going to like them for the ability to add some spot lights to your images
and also off-center vignettes and all sorts of things.
I'm Helen Bradley.
Thank you for joining me for this video tutorial.
Look out for more tutorials on this YouTube channel and visit my website at Projectwoman.com
for more tips, tricks and tutorials on Photoshop, Lightroom, Illustrator and a whole lot more.