A Quick and Helpful Tip for Local Adjustments in Lightroom

Lightroom's local adjustment sliders are a great way to do things like add a graduated filter to a landscape shot or draw attention to your subject with a subtle vignette. Sometimes though, you want to change the strength of your adjustment after the fact, which is where this great tip will help.

If you like to do a lot of local adjustments in Lightroom, you know that one thing they lack compared to using layers in Photoshop is an opacity slider. It turns out that it is possible to change the strength of a local adjustment, as this helpful video from Anthony Morganti shows. If you like to make local adjustments that take advantage of several sliders, trying to alter the strength by changing each individual value is both tedious and makes it nigh impossible to eyeball the overall change in the adjustment. Before you know it, you've thrown everything off, your image is looking terrible, and you've set your wallet on fire in the microwave (I've actually done this; don't ask). The beauty of this method is that it maintains the relative ratios between individual sliders, making it a true strength adjustment. Try it out (and don't microwave your wallet)!