The Photoshop CS4 Companion for Photographers

Localized Corrections with the Adjustment Brush

The Adjustment brush in ACR lets you make localized corrections for exposure, brightness, contrast, saturation, clarity, and sharpness. The brush controls themselves are fairly advanced, enabling you to choose brush diameter and the feathering around it. You can even set the density for your correction giving you the opportunity to decide how much of the original image should show through your correction.

Figure 5-7. Making localized saturation corrections with the Adjustment brush. The pin indicates the area you're working on. The solid circle is the actual adjustment area. The space between the solid circle and the dashed circle is the feathering zone.

The first step toward a happy Adjustment brush experience is to learn how to work with the brush. You can use the Size and Feather sliders as a starting point. But once you get knee-deep into the correction, you're going to want to use keyboard commands to change these parameters.

To begin, select the Adjustment brush, and place your mouse pointer over the area you want to work on. Tap the right and left bracket keys to enlarge or reduce the diameter of your brush. As the diameter increases, you'll see two circles. The solid-line circle is the size of the brush, and the dashed-line circle is the area of feathering outside the correction. Feathering is important because it creates a tapering-off ...