 Today, I'm going to show you the difference between density and flow inside a lightroom What's up nerds? Hope you had a fantastic weekend. Today is Monday and Monday means it's pole day This is a really easy one. Do you like coffee or tea? I know some of you might not like either I'm pretty close to that boat. I prefer tea way over coffee But I rarely drink tea either so I know call me weird, but what do you like? I'd love to know okay density and flow I've been getting this question quite a bit and part of it is my fault because I've shown you guys a lot of Tricks as it relates to the adjustment brush the radio filter the graduated filter in all of those options offer a Brush feature and whenever there's a brush feature There's a density and there's a flow feature and so a lot of you are confused as to what the hell is the Difference between density and flow. It's really easy once you see it So I'm going to jump into lightroom and show you the difference between the two So in order to get to density and flow you need to activate one of these tools I'm going to start with the adjustment brush first Because when I click on the adjustment brush the density and flow is right here available for me It's going to be a little bit more tricky to find when you're in the graduated filter and the radio filter as you'll see In a moment when I come back. So for right now. I'm in the adjustment brush and when we look here at the adjustment brush We can see that there are some brush settings in particular the size feather flow density auto mask which we've been using a ton of lately so What I'm going to do to make this easy is I'm going to set my feathering all the way down to zero just so that Feathering is out of the way and I'm going to just set my brush size to a decent size Something that you'll be able to see in this video Now currently I have flow set to a hundred and I have density set to a hundred I'm going to play with density first So density is really just a fancy way of saying Opacity or think of it as like a sheer piece of of cloth Or another word is strength how strong it is So if I were to move the density to about half say fifty percent That means that now whatever I brush whatever adjustment. I apply it's going to be applied at 50% strength or 50% opacity Now I'm just so that you guys can see this I've set my exposure to all the way I've brought it up to four so it's gonna be really obnoxious, but that's not the point here So if I go over to the picture and I start to brush with density No matter how many times I go back and forth back and forth that That adjustment will always only be at 50% strength So even though I've set the exposure to four in this example It's really only being applied to half that strength and no matter how many times I stop and Start and keep going over that same spot. It will never get any brighter than this Now if we were to put density up to a hundred percent strength and now back our flow Down to 50% we're gonna talk about flow flow is a little bit different flow Think of flow as like a can of spray paint if you've ever spray painted anything in your life Furniture a wall a train. I'm not advising that you do anything like that, but just in case You'll know that the way paint comes out of a spray can is it's a gradual thing You kind of spray one coat gets a little bit of paint you spray over that same spot again It builds you spray again It keeps building and building until whatever it is that your painting is completely covered That's what flow was gonna do so if I set my flow to 50% And I have an exposure still at four When I go over here and I start to paint every time I go Over pass over it. You'll notice how it gradually gets brighter and brighter and brighter now at this point Because I have density set to a hundred it's gonna keep building and building and building and building until I Have reached a maximum exposure of four and that's in that situation because I've set density all the way up Let's reset both of these options and let's Think of it another way if I were to set flow to 50% and density to 50% And I were to come over here now Every time I pass the flow will build and build and build But it will only build up unto the 50% density Because that's one of the settings that I put in here So they kind of work hand-in-hand and it's really up to you to decide How much of the effect do you want to apply and how fast do you want it to apply now? Just for a general rule of thumb. I almost never mess with density just to make it easy on myself I typically just set density to a hundred because if I want my effect to be greater than or less than what I'm applying I'm usually gonna go over to the slider and make my adjustment there So density to for me in my mind doesn't really make sense But flow does Because I might not want my adjustment even though it's aggressive I might not want it to be painted on at a hundred percent right away I might actually prefer that I slowly Gradually and more methodically and carefully paint my adjustment in that way if I decide that what I dialed in was too far I can I can at greater control How fast that adjustment is being applied and then go over to my slider and and manipulate it a little bit So hopefully that makes some sense with respect to the difference between density and flow If not go ahead and leave us some comments down below and I'll think of some other Examples or tutorials that I can do to expand on this topic just a little bit, but before I let you go There's one more thing I just want to make sure that you guys know where density and flow is as it relates to the radial filter and the Graduated filter so if you don't know stick around what we're gonna do is we're gonna go up here to the graduated filter and In order for this to work you have to have a graduated filter applied So I'm gonna go ahead and just apply something and I'm gonna just reset this slider so that it's not anything crazy and Now that I've applied the graduated filter Now my brush feature is activated Brush would not be activated if I didn't apply this graduated filter. That's why I said you have to put this here So now that that's there I can click on the brush feature and now I'll get the flow and density options down here The same thing is true if I were to go up to the radial filter if I click the radial filter You'll notice how the brush option here is not available so I have to apply a filter first and now the brush is available for the filter and Again, you'll see flow and density down here So there is where you find it in those two spots the adjustment brush. It's just in plain sight for you And so hopefully this helped you make some decisions It's basically in a nutshell just a way to kind of control or better control How you're applying the adjustment to the photo so that way you're not just like slapping a bunch of paint on there they're actually doing it with a little bit more finesse and Finesse is good, especially in this kind of stuff and especially if you're painting on trains So anyways, that's all I got for you guys today Hopefully you enjoyed this video if you did give it a thumbs up Subscribes are always welcome. Thank you to all the new followers here to the channel. We appreciate you Comments have been fantastic. Let's keep them going down below and I will see you in the next video Have a great day everybody