 It's lightroom time. Today we're going to talk a little bit more about the graduated filter and again I'm doing this because I want you to kind of you know think a little bit. So in the last episode we showed you how you could customize the graduated filter but what if you wanted to do that same trick in a few different parts of the photograph could you do it and the answer is yes. So I have an example up here and I want to show you what I'm talking about. Basically for this photograph I'm going to break this into three different parts but for your photograph or whatever it is you're working on you might want to break it into two parts or three parts maybe ten parts. It really doesn't matter but I think it's really cool to see how you could break this into layers so to speak. So we're going to jump in here and show you exactly what it is I'm talking about. So I'm going to start by grabbing the graduated filter and what I want to do is I want to work on the buildings as one part the sky as one part and the water as one part. All individual completely separate adjustments using only the graduated filter and nothing else and let's see what we can get with this photograph using this one tool on the image. So what I'm going to do is grab a filter and apply it to the top and if I hit the letter O you can see the overlay. By the way I had gotten this question from somebody who had asked why was the overlay on my lightroom green instead of red. So a really quick tip on that is if you want to change the color of your overlay you can actually do that by hitting shift O. Shift O will change the color of your graduated filter and you have a few different options here you have red which is the default color, you have green, you have white, you have black and then it goes back to red. So green, red, white, black four colors and I believe the reason that they're doing that is because some people are color blind and their eyes can't register colors like red or green they're deficient. So maybe you can't see red very well or maybe you can't see green very well. If you can't see red or green very well you can hit shift O and maybe that'll help you out. One of my favorite photographers in the world, portrait photographers in the world is Joel Grimes who's color deficient so I wonder if he uses this trick. Anyways so I'm going to leave it at red for this instance and let's get ready. So I said for the first adjustment I only wanted this to affect the sky so that means that anything that's being covered with the buildings I don't want that to be the case. So I'm going to go over here to brush, choose erase, make sure that my settings are dialed in correctly and make sure the auto mask feature is turned on. That's the big kicker and then all I'm going to do is go and click on the buildings and get some of that stuff removed from here and as I go around clicking on the buildings you can see that red overlay starting to disappear in a really nice advanced way. Now once I have a majority of this gone I could always turn the auto mask feature off and make my brush much much smaller and with that I could go in here and just erase any of the spillage on these buildings or that red overlay that kind of got left behind. So I'm just playing clean up at this point and making sure I have it exactly the way I want it. This doesn't need to be perfect but I want to get it pretty close and that looks pretty good. So now that I've customized this for the sky I can turn my overlay off and I can start to make any adjustments necessary that are going to give me the look and feel that I want for this. I maybe add a little bit of blue to that sky, maybe play with my highlights and my whites a little bit. Yeah that's looking pretty good maybe pull the exposure down some. All right so that's one graduated filter just for the sky. Let's go ahead and hit the new button okay anytime you want to add another graduated filter you need to make sure that you choose new so I'm going to do that and I'm going to apply this again and if I turn the overlay off you can see how now the buildings are being affected but so too is the sky. So I'm going to use the same trick I'm going to go to brush and erase and we're going to make sure our brush is really big make sure auto mask is turned on and we're going to click in the blue area of the sky and just like that we've taken out this effect so nothing will alter the sky that's important because I've already made adjustments to the sky I don't want to change the sky again I only want the buildings to be affected here so I can turn my overlay off and start to make any necessary adjustments maybe a little bit of clarity maybe maybe some shadows maybe some saturation for the colors maybe pull some of this blue back maybe a little contrast yeah so that looks pretty good now I'm going to do it one last final time for the water again hit new this time I'm going to drag from the bottom up okay if I turn my overlay on you can see how the water is being affected here okay but in this instance maybe I don't want like the really dark shadows of the waterline to be affected so I will go to brush go to erase make sure my brush is really big and just click on any element in the photo that's super dark and that will make sure that all of that gets taken out something like that okay and I can turn the overlay off and so what this means is that any adjustment that is applied is only being applied to the water specifically so I can add a little bit of saturation some clarity maybe maybe even add a little bit of blue to the water maybe even lift the shadows a little bit add some contrast and that looks pretty good so let's turn the graduated filter off and hit our black backslash button so we could see a quick before and after of what these three adjustments have done that looks pretty awesome so this time we used three graduated filters unlike the last video we only used one this image we used three and customize all three of them completely different to edit just the parts of the photograph that we wanted to and I could keep going and going with this or I could start using some of the other tools or maybe just basic adjustments that will affect everything as a whole if you haven't already done so subscribe to our channel we'll have a lot more tips like this coming to you like this video if you like it and as always thank you so much for your support my name is Adam I'm out