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I am SO EXCITED to share this little tip with you today! It is quite possible that this is something that was SUPER obvious to everyone but me, but it took me a couple of years to have this “Ah-Ha” moment.
For a REALLY LONG time I have wished that Lightroom had sliders in the brush tool that said “remove red” or “remove green” and I could paint with those brushes in just specific areas of my photo. But it didn’t. Which left me taking photos into Photoshop every time there was a color cast on skin that needed work or redness on the face that needed to be managed (red nose from the cold, red eyes from allergies, etc.)
And then one day an idea just popped into my head. A way that I could do the very thing that I had always wanted to do. Maybe not as simply as I had wanted. But still awfully good!
To see the tip, watch the video or read on down below! Or do both because there is a better before and after than you can see in the video at the end of this post!!
For this example I am using a photo of my nephew. He was having some allergy issues the day we took these, so his eyes and some of the areas around his eyes were abnormally red. This is something that I would normally have to take into Photoshop to fix. But not today!
First, I click on the brush tool and change the brightness to about 5 (don’t do this always–but for this example it works nicely) and then move down to the color box and click!
This will pull up a color box with lots of options. I know that green counteracts red and red counteracts green. The same is true of blue and yellow. So, using the eyedropper, I will select a green color. You can adjust the saturation of the green color that you chose with the little slider with an “S” in front of it below all the colors. When working with skin or eyes, I usually keep this somewhere between 5 and 12% saturation.
Then, I use the brush tool to paint over the areas that I want to apply this change to. In this case, I want to paint over the whites of his eyes, along his lower eyelids, and just below the eye.
Notice the difference after painting on the slightest bit of green!
You can apply this same technique to areas of the face where you might have a bit of a color cast from a piece of clothing or an object in the photo.
Hope this helps you get better photos with Lightroom!!
Hi!! I am Gayle. I am a wife to my handsome husband and mom to 4 beautiful kids. In my spare time, I am a photographer and blogger at Mom and Camera. I have a passion for sharing my love of photography with others. I teach local photography classes and regularly share photography tips and tricks on my blog. I hang out there a lot—I’d love you to stop by and visit!
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11 Responses to Correcting Color—Just Where You Want It!
I pinned Correcting color
Wow! Thank you for this tip! I never would have thought of it, but it makes perfect sense! Now if Lightroom 4 would come out with Photoshop’s Content Aware Healing, I wouldn’t even need to open Photoshop!
Thank you so much for the tip!!!! I’ll take all the tips I can get! Pinned it!
Thanks Gayle for sharing this! I didn’t really know what I should use this tool for but that’s a good tip! Do you have any other uses that you know of for using the color brush?
Nice tip…always saw the “Color” there, but didn’t explored that.
Wow! Thank you so much! I just tried this on a photo of my daughter where her nose was little red and it worked!!! I don’t have Photoshop and was always frustrated by not being able to remove red in one spot.
Thanks! I’ve been editing a lot of red noses… for some reason I was trying to use the yellow color… didn’t work too well. haha.
I know this was meant just as a quick tip to help people out, but I have to tell you that this simple little trick for removing red is so much more to me than that! I’ve been using LR for over a year and had never thought of this! My youngest suffers from some sort of chronic rash on his face. He’s been to the doctor over half a dozen times, tried just as many medications and they just can’t figure it out. It’s always there, always the first thing I notice in a photo. I tried the healing tool and other such fixes but they left that part of his face looking fake. So I just accepted that all the pictures from this stage in his life would be characterized by this dumb rash that has no name. Then I saw this tutorial. And I cried. Because it worked. Now I can have pictures of my little boy that show his personality, not his condition. Thank you SO MUCH. I can’t even tell you how much this blesses me!
Lea, that makes me so happy to hear. Thank you for taking the time to share.
So glad this is all helping you as much as it has helped me!! Thanks for sharing your experiences.
Great tip. I have tried to do this but how do you get just a regular brush. It forces me to pick the type of brush to use…(iris enhance, color, etc). Am I missing something? Thanks for your help.