Let your skies shine

Louise Carey demonstrates how to selectively enhance overexposed skies with the Adjustment Brush tool in Adobe Lightroom Classic CC

- Louise Carey

THE MISSION

Adjust a specific part of your picture in Lightroom

Time needed

20 minutes

Skill level

Beginner

Kit needed

Adobe Lightroom Classic CC

The brilliant glow of a sun-soaked sky can be the perfect cherry on top of your landscape photography sundae. But, getting the right exposure for both land and sky can be tricky.

Some photographers like to capture multiple exposures and blend them together, but a single Raw image contains so much information, that there’s actually a far simpler solution.

Lightroom is equipped with the Adjustment Brush tool, found in the Develop module. This tool enables users to selectively brush adjustments onto their image. So, if you find yourself with a beautiful sunset that you just couldn’t expose correctly in-camera, the Adjustment Brush tool comes in very handy.

No matter whether you’re shooting a flat horizon (such as the beach scene above), or a more complicated vista that includes trees, mountains or architecture, the Adjustment Brush tool enables you to paint over specific aspects of your image and edit them without affecting anything else within the frame. It’s a great tool for other photographic genres as well – fantastic for adding an extra glint to a subject’s eyes in a portrait, or even reducing the saturation of a particularly garish piece of clothing. The possibilities are truly endless.