How to edit a selected area of a photo in Lightroom?

Forum|Forum|11 years ago
September 21, 2014
3 replies
20829 views

Hello everybody. I just don't manage to figure this out - how can I edit a selected area of a photo in Lightroom 5? I thought my answer was the Adjustment Brush, but this doesn't seem to be the case. Here is what I want to do:

I want to reduce the saturation of a specific colour (blue), but only on a selected part of the photo, not for the whole photo. Let's say I have a blue circle on the top, and another one on the bottom - I want to reduce the saturation only of the first one. If I choose the Adj. Brush with saturation set to -100 and use it in the selected area, it reduces the saturation of all colours in that area and I want it to work just for one colour.

Any help will be appreciated, thanks in advance.

This topic has been closed for replies.

motionpads

Participant

I ran into this issue as well. I had a kitchen island that I needed to tone down the blue but there was a blue chair in the background that needed to stay blue. Using the brush tool in LR was going to be time consuming because I would have to work around bar stools that were in the picture over the blue area I need to tone down. The solution was to do what you are saying, select and area and only adjust the HSL on that selected area. The worksround is to open in Photoshop, select the area you want to adjust (the selection - in my case - didn't need to be exact and I feathered the selection) and create a new layer of that selection. Then, with the new layer selected, open the Filter > Camera Raw Filter and you can then adjust the HSL for that layer. Hope that helps.

GoldingD

Legend

Deleated, my bad.

accobbAuthor

Participant

So I see then, localized editing sounded for me like one of the most natural things to do during the edition process, but apparently LR cannot do that. Thank you very much for the quick replies! In the end I did my job the "lame" way - I split my photo in two, edited the HSL in the top half, and then joined the two parts again. Hopefully selective HSL will be available for LR in the near future, as it's not completely impossible, if I understood correctly.

Have a nice week!

areohbee

Legend

accobb wrote:

So I see then, localized editing sounded for me like one of the most natural things to do during the edition process, but apparently LR cannot do that. Thank you very much for the quick replies! In the end I did my job the "lame" way - I split my photo in two, edited the HSL in the top half, and then joined the two parts again. Hopefully selective HSL will be available for LR in the near future, as it's not completely impossible, if I understood correctly.

Have a nice week!

Fingers crossed for Lr6..

Rikk Flohr: Inactive

Participating Frequently

You could use a variation of this technique - it might work- depends on your image. Lightroom Quick Tip: Removing Rosacia - YouTube

accobbAuthor

Participant

Thank you, Rikk Flohr, but unfotunately this technique is not suitable for my image. The most suitable thing would be just to free-hand select the desired are of the photo and then edit it with the HSL tab - that would be perfect! And sounds like a simple thing to do, I think, but I cannot manage to find how to to this. I don't want to believe that it's not possible with LR.

So let's put it another way - I want to reduce the saturation of the blue colour via the HSL tab, but only for the top half of my image! Simple, right? Help is still needed.

Rikk Flohr: Inactive

Participating Frequently

At this time, selective edits of this nature require a pixel-based editor like Photoshop. Sorry.

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