Adjusting Specific Areas

The first blog photo has a red overlay to clearly show the sky area that was selected so it could be processed separately from all other areas. The second photo is the finished image. (Apologies for the out of focus, fuzzy look in the red masked version, it is a screen shot). There are other viewing options in Photoshop so you can work on the selection and see the effects you are applying.

The photo has a very underexposed sky that is impossible to adjust properly without affecting the adjacent mountains unless the sky area is selected and the rest of the photo is masked. Adjustments then take place only on the selected area and the masked areas are protected. Only the mid tones or “exposure” of the sky was modified but any of Photoshop’s adjustments could be applied such as contrast, vibrance, color balance etc.

General tools like the Adjustment Brush and Graduated Filter are great but many may not be exact enough to satisfactorily modify specific areas of a photo because they can affect an area unevenly and can spill over into adjacent areas where you don’t want changes. While not available in Lightroom, Photoshop has some very effective tools for selecting specific areas in order to apply adjustments.

A selection is made on a separate layer from the background so nothing on the background layer is affected. There are several tools available to select the pixels you want including the Quick Selection Tool, Lasso Tool and the Magic Wand. Adobe has been using machine learning artificial intelligence for several years and today’s tools are significantly better at distinguishing the pixels you want from adjacent pixels. The more you use a tool the more it understands what you want to select. Not perfect but quite clever and useful.

Once a basic selection is made there are tools to further refine the selection edges such as the Refine Edge Brush and the Paint Brush Tool. And if these are not enough there is always the Pen Tool where you can manually draw selection edges exactly where you want them; labor intensive but exact.

There is plenty of help to learn about selection methods including from Adobe (such as helpx.adobe.com/photoshop/user-guide.html) other instruction providers and of course lots of YouTube videos. Good hard copy books are also very useful such as Martin Evening’s Photoshop for Photographers manual.