Lightroom Tip of the Day. Adjustment Brush Tools – Reset Sliders and Pins. Part 2

by Peter Zack

We’ve decided to start a new series of Lightroom tips here on EtL. You will find all of these in our menu above. Look for “lessons” and find ‘Lightroom tip of the day’ in the scroll down menu.

So here’s tip 2-3:

The adjustment brush is a very powerful tool and this section will contain multiple tips because when I started to consider writing this tip, I realized that in some future articles, we’ll have to get in greater detail of some Lightroom sections like the Adjustment brush. To begin with we’ll explain or define some of the terms Adobe uses to describe parts of the software. One such item, Adobe calls the section where the adjustments or set of controls for a tool the ‘tool drawer’. Often you will find sliders used to adjust parts of the tool you are going to use or adjust things like a colour, sharpness and so on.

So here’s a few things about using the adjustment brush (or local adjustments).
Pin’s (Pins are the white dots on the image where you’ve made an adjustment) can show you which is ‘active’ or selected. If the pin is white, then the pin isn’t selected, if it has a black dot, then it is selected and you can make adjustments to it. This is very handy to be able to adjust various parts of the same image. You might have a dark region you need to brighten or often called dodging. A bright area might be burned to darken it and balance the scene.

Assuming you’ve already made some adjustment brush changes to the image, if you want to hide the pins or make them visible, just hit the “H” key. So if the pins are hidden and the adjustment brush tool drawer is open, then hit “H” and the pins will become visible. Click the pin you want to adjust.

The Adjustment Brush tool drawer allows you to specify options for two brushes, A and B and within each you can select New or Edit. Select a brush by clicking the letter, or switch between brushes by pressing the slash key (/). Then if you have made different adjustments with each ‘A’ and ‘B’ you can make further changes to each without affecting the other. Brush options “stick” regardless of the effect you choose to apply until you change them.

Tip 1: You can click on the pin and select it, then to make a small adjustment you can put the mouse over the Pin and hold down the left mouse button, Drag the mouse left or right and you will see whatever sliders you’ve earlier adjusted, move and adjust further. I find this just an ‘OK’ feature but it does work and might be easier if you find, fine adjustments to the slider(s) a bit tough.

Tip 2: To reset the slider or any of the controls in the Tool Drawer to their default positions, just double click on the word of that item. So lets say you have changed the brightness and want to reset to the middle, double click the word ‘brightness’. This applies to most of the controls.

Cheers and good shooting
-Peter Zack

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