 Today, I'm going to show you how to make selections inside of Lightroom. Welcome nerds! Today is Monday and Monday means it's pole day. This one's really easy. I just want to know if you like dogs or cats. I like dogs. Tell us what you like in the poll here or leave us a comment down in the description below. As far as today's video goes, in a previous video I talked about creating depth and in that video I actually broke the photo down into three sections and that really threw some of you guys for a loop and I got a lot of questions asking, hey, how did you make those selections? So I'm going to just gloss on making selections inside of Lightroom and it's really, really easy. I know I say that all the time, but it's really easy once you see it. So here's the deal. You have three types of tools to go ahead and make selections. One is the adjustment brush. One is the radio filter and one is the graduated filter. And I say three because you have three adjustments when it comes to making specific selections. That's the key. So here, I've got a photograph of Half Dome in Yosemite National Park and to me this is another example of a photo that's kind of broken into three sections. I have the sky. I have the mountain area and I have this tree line in the bottom right hand corner. Those to me look like three different parts and I would probably edit these in three different ways because again, I want to create that depth in this photograph or at least make it appear as though there's some depth in this photograph. So I could start with any one of those three tools that I mentioned. It's really up to you and your image, what you start with. But what we want to do is make the selection and then modify the selection, then make a new selection and modify that selection and keep repeating this for as many selections as you feel you need to make for your images. In this particular case, I need to make three selections and modify each one of those individually and just for the hell of it, I'm going to use three tools to do it. So let's jump in and show you exactly what I'm talking about. I could start in any order. It really doesn't matter. I'm going to start with the graduated filter first. And so I'm going to just click and drag to apply my filter. Now I can't really see what's going on. So I need to turn our overlay mask on so that way I can see what's being selected in red. That's really, really important. Now you can do this two ways. You can click on this button down at the bottom of your screen or if you don't see that you could simply hit the letter O and that will turn it on. But what I'm looking at is what's red because what's red is what's being selected. So once I have that in place, the next thing for me to do is to modify this selection because if I look a little closer here, you can see how the red is spilling over the tree line and onto the mountain in the middle and that's not what I want here. So I'm going to go ahead and click on the brush button right here. That's going to give me some brush settings and I can click on the eraser and I'm going to make sure that the auto mask feature is turned on. Now as I go here and I start erasing this red from that background and from this tree line and that kind of stuff, I'm just trying to make sure that I don't erase too much or too little. Again, every image is different and every image dictates. But if you take your time, have a little bit of patience, usually the auto mask feature will work itself pretty well depending on your photograph. I think so far this is doing a fantastic job. So there you go. I've made a selection now of the tree line, which is exactly what I wanted. Now to add my adjustments, I want to see what I'm doing. I'm going to turn the overlay off by hitting the letter O and I'm going to go ahead and just make a few adjustments to that tree line. We've gone from this to this and I've only affected that first part of the photograph. Now let's do this again, but this time we're going to adjust the sky. So I'm going to switch from the graduated filter and go to the adjustment brush. I could use any tool, but because I want you guys to see the different ways of doing this, I'm going to make my life difficult and I'm going to use the adjustment brush. All right, that looks pretty good. So I've applied the adjustment to the sky. Okay, if I turn the O on and off, that's my overlay. You can see there's a little bit of spill on the mountains here and in the tree line and even on the top of half dome. So I'm going to go to eraser and I'm going to modify some of that just like I did before. All right, that looks pretty good. I'm going to hit O to turn the overlay off and I'm going to just make a couple of adjustments to the sky to really add some drama and effect to that. So probably some de-haze, some clarity, some contrast, maybe even take a little de-noise down and that looks pretty good. All right, so I've affected the sky, I've affected the foreground. Only thing left to do now is to play with the mountains. So I'm going to use a completely different tool this time. I'm going to use the radial filter because it's the only one we haven't used yet and I'm going to just make a huge circle on here and if I hit O, you can see that O the overlay is on the wrong side. It's actually affecting the outside of the circle instead of the inside of the circle. No problem. All I have to do is click this invert mask button and boom. Now it's affecting the inside of the circle and I'm just going to make sure that this circle covers the entire part of the photograph that I want to fix. And then the only thing left to do now is you guessed it. Go ahead and erase the parts that I don't want to change. So I'm going to grab my brush, go to erase and I'm going to start getting rid of all this excess stuff. All right, so if we come back, we can see that now the overlay is on the middle part of the picture, leaving those other areas alone. I'm going to turn the overlay off and I'm going to make a few adjustments to that mountain range there and that's looking pretty good. So if we look at the before and after, we've affected three parts of the photograph in three different ways and that's how you make selections. Really easy, really straightforward. It's all about adding the selection and then erasing the parts you don't want. The last thing I'm going to say just as a little side note, just in case you guys aren't confused or if you are confused. When I say erase or brush, I'm not switching, say from the radial filter or graduated filter over to the adjustment brush. I'm staying within the tool that I'm using and I'm using the brush features that are built into that tool. If we look a little bit deeper here, if I were to go to the graduated filter, you'll see that there's three options here, new, edit and brush. When I click on brush, that's where you're going to find the erase options. If I activate this and go over to brush, you'll see here are my brush settings and here's the eraser. If I go to the radial filter, same thing. I have new, edit and brush. So if I go to brush, I have brush settings and I have an eraser there. The same is true if I go to the adjustment brush, at the bottom I have brushes and I have erasers. So each one of these three tools has a brush, two of them in fact, and an eraser. So you apply the effect and then you erase it. Apply a new effect and erase what you don't want. This is the beauty of making the selections and then from there you can do anything that you really want to do. Last thing before we go, don't forget to like us on Instagram at PhotonerdsUnite. Every Wednesday we're going to be featuring a photo of the week. Use the hashtag PNFL. If you missed it, here's last week's submission. This Wednesday we'll be looking for new submissions and sharing them here on the YouTube channel. Hopefully you enjoyed this video. Thank you so much for watching. We'll see you on Wednesday. Have a great day everybody.