We did a photo session for some friends of ours this morning, and while I was going through them this afternoon in Lightroom, I came across the Targeted Adjustment Tool in Lightroom’s Develop Module.  Of course, I’ve known it was there for a long time, but never found myself really using it much.  Well, today’s pics really called out for it.

First, let me describe the situation for you – we were trying to get some good fall color here in the Denver area.  We found a nice batch of trees to give us some color and the way they were situated meant the leaves were nicely backlit from strong, direct morning sunlight, as shown in the before picture below. That was great for the leaves, but meant the nice blue sky became fairly washed out and flat from my shooting angle.

Here’s where the Targeted Adjustment Tool (TAT) comes in to play.  Below is the before and after screen caps of the tool.  In the HSL/Color/Luminance part of the right panel select Luminance, then simply click on the icon circled in red, and click anywhere in the lightest part of the blue sky and drag downwards with your mouse.  As you can see in the after portion (on the right below), this decreases the Luminance values of the Blues and really brings the sky back to what my eye saw (as you can see in the final version of the image at the bottom).  In some quick tests today, I’ve found values in the -30 to -45 range seem to work pretty well.

I figured since I had basically forgotten about this tool, that some folks might enjoy seeing this quick tip, and possibly discover or rediscover it for themselves.  Hope you found this useful.  Are there other tools like this that you’ve forgotten?  Hit me in the comments…

The final image, after decreasing luminance in the Blues.  It just fixes the sky a little bit and adds impact to the image: