 Before I get into today's video, I've got two things that I want to talk about. First of all, I want to say thank you to all the new YouTube subscribers. It's really cool to see the channel finally starting to pick up and grow a little bit. We wouldn't be anything without you guys. I know a lot of YouTubers say that, but we really mean it. We wouldn't be here if it weren't for you. So thank you to all the subscribers. The second thing on a personal note is I went today to get a hot straight razor shave and shape on my beard. And man, I'm feeling good. So with all further ado, let's jump into today's Lightroom video. Today is an awesome one. And the reason that today is an awesome one is because I'm going to show you how to customize your graduated filter. I know for some of you, you may be using some of these tools. What we're hoping to do, though, is to kind of get you thinking of different ways, maybe new ways to use a tool inside of Lightroom. In this particular example, I'm actually combining the graduated filter with a technique that we talked about in a previous video, which was how to use the automask. I actually made two videos on how to use the automask feature. One video was for a simple way of using it. The other was for a more complex way of using it. If you haven't seen those videos already, go ahead and check it out up at the top or we'll leave some links down in the description below. But what we're going to do is we're going to combine that technique with the graduated filter so that you can actually customize exactly what it is that you're trying to edit. So let's jump into Lightroom and show you exactly what it is I'm talking about. So I've got this picture here that was taken in Vermont and the cool thing about this photo is all of the foreground. This is of a barn out there that's pretty popular. And what I want to do in this image is actually edit the bottom half of the photograph. So the graduated filter will work out perfectly for this. So I'm going to grab the graduated filter. I'm going to drag from the bottom up something that we talked about in a previous graduated filter video is how you can move these pins and manipulate them around so this works out perfect for this image. I'm going to move this into place and I'm going to reset the sliders that were there. So if I turn the overlay on, you'll see that only the bottom half of this photograph is actually going to receive any of the adjustments that I decide to apply. So now that I've got the graduated filter in place, I'm going to make some changes. Again, this trick has nothing to do with the changes. We'll get to it in a second. So I think I'm going to just maybe add a little bit of sharpness, maybe a little bit of de-haze, maybe some clarity, all the normal stuff that you probably already do in the basics panel. I'm going to kind of do here. The one thing that's bugging me about this picture, though, is the color. I actually want to add a little bit more color, especially to those trees. So I'm going to pull the saturation up and I'm even going to go to the temperature and maybe add a little bit more of a yellow and a little bit more red to the trees. Now, here's where the trick comes into play. I've made all these adjustments to the bottom half of the picture, which is awesome. But the problem is that I don't actually want this adjustment to go on the entire picture. In fact, I'm really not crazy about what it's doing to the grass. I think the grass is a little strong. So I'd prefer to take that out and maybe do that as a separate adjustment. And so you can do this here. By the way, these are the exact same things or decisions that you make inside of Photoshop. This is why users love Photoshop so much, because if you understand how to use a layer mask, you can go in there and paint in or paint out whatever you want. The problem is that it's so confusing for some people or if you've never used Photoshop, you're terrified to use it. You can do some similar things here. I know there aren't layer masks inside of Lightroom, but you can do some similar things here. So here's where the magic happens. This is where we customize the graduated filter to give it sort of that Photoshop layer mask kind of effect. What we're going to do is we're going to go to the brush part of the graduated filter. We're going to select it. And we're going to combine the automask trick that we did before, which means that we are going to lower the feathering to zero, make sure flow is at 100, density is at 100. We're going to make sure our automask feature is turned on. And we're going to make our brush as big as it'll possibly go. The idea is that I want my brush to be able to engulf. The radius should like go the entire photo if possible. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to go turn on the overlay mask so you can actually see what happens here. And I'm going to go click on the green grass because that's what I actually want to remove. The last thing, and I almost forgot to do this, is when you're on the brush settings down here at the bottom, make sure that you're on the eraser part of this, not A or B. You want to make sure you you select eraser. So again, feather at zero, flow at 100, density at 100 and make the brush as large as possible. Once I've dialed in those settings, I can essentially erase any part of this graduated filter that I don't want. And I can do it in a very, very specific way, targeted way. So again, I don't want anything to show up on the grass. So I'm going to click on the grass and look at that. All of that stuff that was in the grass has immediately been erased. I also don't want the grass that's in this bottom corner. So I'm going to erase that by clicking on it. And that's pretty advanced, a pretty detailed selection. So let's see exactly what that did to the photo. I'm going to turn the overlay off and I'm going to toggle this adjustment on and off so you can see what it did. And you can see how this has really specifically only applied those adjustments to the trees and the barn and some of those areas. But it took out all the stuff that I that I clicked on, all the green stuff, all the grass elements. It completely removed that stuff from there. So again, if I turn the overlay off, that's the graduated filter. But it has been completely customized and you can apply this to anything. You can apply this to flowers, trees, skies. You can use this on portraits, anything like that. The sky's the limit. So you go ahead and try it on your photographs. Leave us a comment down below. Let us know what you think. If you like this video, give it a thumbs up. If you haven't already subscribed to our channel, please do so. We'll have a lot more videos coming to you soon. Thank you so much for watching. My name is Adam. I'm out.