Camera Raw Graduated Filter Tool: Selective Adjustments
https://www.shutterbuggs.com/ - In this video, we’re going to take a look at the graduated tool and the selections that can be made using the adjustment brush. To begin with, let’s first go to the Tools menu up in the top left-hand corner of Camera Raw, where you’ll notice you’ll have the graduated tool icon. Now, you can either click on it or hit G on the keyboard to select the graduated filter.
Now, the first thing you’ll notice with the graduated filter panel is that a lot of the features or sliders that are available there come from the Basic panel, which is really quite neat. Now, to use this tool, it’s very similar to the gradient tool in Photoshop. You need to select one point on your image, and then drag your mouse and stop at another point on your image. Now, in this case, as you can see here, we’ve got some dotted lines that indicate the areas that we’re actually selecting on our image.
So for this particular photograph, what I want to do is primarily only adjust the sky, just down to the sea in the right-hand corner of the image. So I’m going to get that just to sit about there in the height adjustment. You can either… If you want to, you can have this parallel with your image or the horizon line of your actual photograph, or you can actually adjust it at a particular angle that you actually want it to sit at. In this case, I’m just going to leave it parallel to my image.
So now that we have the area selected that we actually want to make adjustments to, we can begin to use the sliders in the panel. Now, the sliders are going to be affected the same way as if you had a graduated selection in Photoshop. Only certain areas of the selection are actually going to show the changes.
So for example, as we make an exposure adjustment, you’ll notice that the top of the image is actually being adjusted, but the bottom half of the selection isn’t really being affected that much. So as you can see, it’s graduated.
Now, a couple neat things that you can actually do with this. First off is you’ve obviously got brightness, contrast, and saturation settings, but you’ve also got clarity, which is really quite neat. So you can actually make certain areas that you actually select stand out from the image, which I find really quite useful, especially when you’re adding a graduated color filter to the image. So in this case, I’ve actually got orange selected here. Now, that actually, to me, doesn’t quite look right, and it looks a bit muddy.
So what I’m going to do is click on that, and I’m going to go to my color picker, and I’m going to choose a different color. So you can actually essentially add any color to your graduated filter as you want. So in this particular case, I’d like sort of a darker orange to match the orange hues of the sunlight that are on these pancake rocks that I photographed in New Zealand. Now, that’s slightly a little bit too much. No, that’s not too bad to begin with.
So once I’ve selected a color here, you can either choose to fine-tune your hue selection in increments of one, or you can actually change the amount of saturation by using this slider. So I’m going to leave it just set to 100, and I’m going to click Okay. So as you can see, it’s quite an interesting effect that you can actually add to your image, especially if your highlights in your sky are very light. You can bring back a lot of detail back into your image that predominantly wasn’t visually there originally.
So that’s how we essentially use the graduated filter. Down on the bottom, you’ll notice there’s a Show Overlay check box. So you can actually turn off that overlay. So you don’t notice it now. If I go up to the preview icon at the top, you can see the adjustment that I’ve made to the image, which is pretty neat. I’m going to increase the clarity because that’s also… I think that helps the mountains stand out a little bit more as well. I’ve lost a little blue in the sea itself, but for this particular example, I’m not really going to worry about it. So that’s pretty neat.
Next, what we can do is actually… To get off the graduated filter, you actually need to change tools, for starters, because it can be a little bit iffy if you are trying to jump back and forth, and you haven’t actually used this tool before. So what I’m going to do now is I’m going to jump across to the adjustment brush. You can either click on it, once again, or press K on your keyboard to bring up the Adjustment Brush panel. What you’ll notice is you’ll have quite a reasonable size radius for your actual brush itself, which can be changed using the bracket keys on your keyboard. So you can actually change the size, or you can use the size slider that appears in the actual panel itself.
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