Lightroom post processing techniques – radial filter

Photography Editing & Workflow Read about my photography experience

By Simon Hawketts ·

House fly

I like macro photography, but this post uses a macro photograph to point out a Lightroom 5 post processing technique I've started to use a bit which is Radial Filters.

Cropped and post processed in Lightroom

This pretty unremarkable picture of a fly was taken a few weeks ago, and I'd mostly forgotten about it. But I was looking through the pictures I'd taken and realised that I could improve this one if I could blur the flower a bit and bring the fly into more prominence. I did that using a new addition to Lightroom called Radial filters.

Basically a radial filter is an area of the picture which you can create and apply a specific alteration to the area. I applied two to this picture, both of them to the body of the fly. The first was applied as a circle around the fly's head and added some extra sharpening and highlight recovery. The second was applied to the fly's body as a whole and then reversed, to apply a softening using negative clarity. This gives the impression of a much shallower depth of field than I had actually achieved in the original shot.

Ideally I would have taken the shot this way to start, but I'm becoming more and more impressed with Lightroom's ability to rescue shots.

  • Pentax K5
  • Tamron 90mm f/2.8
  • f/6.3
  • iso800
  • 1/1600sec
  • 90mm

Comments (8)

  1. Pankaj Jyoti Barua
    Amazing macro.....

    Comments (1)

    1. Simon Hawketts
      Thanks
  2. Gregory Williams
    Great tip. Started using LR a few weeks ago.

    Comments (1)

    1. Simon Hawketts
      Thanks - it's a great program. I'm always finding new ways to improve photos
  3. Victor Rakmil
    Excellent tip. The radial filter is also in Photoshop Adobe Raw.

    Comments (1)

    1. Simon Hawketts
      Ah ok - I'm not that familiar with photoshop although I do have a copy of elements.
  4. Pat
    Wonderful macro.