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The Lightroom Graduated Filter is a versatile tool for making local adjustments to your photos. Don’t be fooled by the name – it may be named after a type of filter used for making skies darker in landscape photography, but its uses go far beyond that.
Before we look at how you can use the Graduated Filter tool to improve your images, you may want to think about the style in which you’d like to process the photo. What is your ultimate aim? My article Finding and Achieving Your Style in Lightroom will give you some advice on figuring that out. Once you know what you want to do, the rest falls into place.
1. Click on the Graduated filter icon underneath the Histogram (the keyboard shortcut for it is “M”). The Graduated filter panel opens up beneath, revealing the sliders that you can adjust.
2. Hold the left mouse button down and drag the mouse across the image to place the Graduated filter. In this example I held the mouse button down while I dragged to create a wide Graduated Filter. There is a lot of space between the lines making up the filter, indicating that it will create a smooth graduation.
3. If you let go of the mouse button early, you create a narrow Graduated Filter that gives a harder graduation. Drag the pin to position the Graduated Filter where you need it.
Here, I set Exposure to -4.0 to show you the difference between the two types of Graduated Filter:
Now you know how to use the Graduated Filter tool, here a few ways you can make your photos better with it.
Note: you can reposition the placement by dragging the pin, or widen the gradation any time even after applying the filter. Just reactivate it, select it (the dot will be black) and adjust. To adjust the gradation just hover the mouse over one of the edges, click to grab it, hold down the mouse button and pull to widen or narrow the spread.
Let’s start with the obvious application of using the Graduated Filter to make the skies in landscape photos darker. Note that the Graduated Filter can’t rescue you if the sky in your photo is so overexposed that detail is lost – you may still need to use a neutral density graduated filter when you take the photo in the first place.
The first step is to make the sky darker. I did this by adding a Graduated Filter and pulling back Exposure to -1.81. Every photo is different, so use your eye to judge the Exposure adjustment required on your photos.
My aim with this landscape was to make the foreground darker and sharper, directing the viewer’s gaze towards the horizon. I achieved this by adding another Graduated Filter from the bottom. But this time, as well as adjusting Exposure to -0.79, I increased Contrast to +20 and Clarity to +27:
Here’s a before and after comparison, so you can see the difference adding the Graduated Filters has made. The two simple adjustments have transformed the photo.
Another use of the Graduated Filter is to adjust colour temperature in part of the image. Sticking with the same landscape photo, I selected the top Graduated Filter to activate it and set Temp to 30. This warmed up the sky, emphasising the deep orange and red colours of the sunset:
Be careful with adjusting Temp. If you push the slider too far the results may not look natural.
Moving away from landscapes, Graduated Filters are a handy way of making the edges of your images darker. This helps direct the viewer’s attention towards the focal point.
This diagram shows roughly where I placed the three Graduated Filters. The benefit of using individual Graduated Filters (instead of the Radial Filter or Adjustment Brush) is that you can adjust each one individually.
The Color setting at the bottom of the Graduated Filter panel lets you add a tint. It is laid over the filter in addition to the effects created by whichever sliders you choose to adjust. To select a colour, click on the colour picker icon at bottom of the Graduated Filter panel (the white rectangle with black cross inside indicates no colour has been selected) and select the colour you wish to add:
One use of this is to add a colour wash to a photo, to make it look as though the subject is lit by the light from the setting sun. This technique works best when the subject was genuinely shot during the golden hour, and you use the Graduated Filter to emphasize that. In this example I selected an orange hue to imitate the sun and set Exposure to +1.16 to lighten that side of the image.
The Sharpness slider in the Graduated Filter panel is dual purpose. From zero to -50 it reduces sharpness. From -50 to -100 it creates lens blur. This lets you replicate the effect of using a tilt-shift lens or large format camera to create a photo with a tilted plane of focus. This is what it looks like. You may have to look closely – the model’s head is sharp but the areas at the top and bottom are not.
I created this effect by adding five Graduated Filters, two at the top, and three at the bottom, their position shown by the coloured lines. The effect works best with a narrow Graduated Filter.
Hopefully these tips will help you use the Graduated Filter more creatively. Lightroom is great for processing your photos and understanding how its tools work will help you use it more effectively. If you’re new to Lightroom, then my article Seven Pieces of Advice for New Lightroom Users will help you get started. Once you’ve mastered the Graduated Filter, I suggest you read Four Ways to Improve Your Photos With the Clarity Slider in Lightroom or 3 Uses for the Radial Filter Tool in Lightroom 5 to learn how to use more of Lightroom’s fabulous tools. Have fun!
By the way, I’m curious to hear how you use Graduated Filters in Lightroom. What techniques have you come up with? Please share them with other readers in the comments.
Mastering Lightroom: Book One and Two
My Mastering Lightroom ebooks are a complete guide to using Lightroom’s Library and Develop modules. Written for Lightroom 4 & 5 they take you through every panel in both modules and show you how to import and organise your images, use Collections and creatively edit your photos.