As many would have already known, I use both the Cap­ture One Pro 7 and Adobe Pho­to­shop Light­room for my post process and teth­er­ing needs. You can read more about my Adobe Pho­to­shop Light­room process flow here.

I also shoot a lot of white and/or black back­grounds of recent, and I have devel­oped these Adjust­ment Brush(k) pre­sets to use with Adobe Pho­to­shop Light­room.

Before & After Lightroom

White Back­ground Blowout effect, before and after

Before & After Lightroom

Black Back­ground Dark­en effect, before and after. By the way, if you can’t see the dif­fer­ence of blacks, you might need to recal­i­brate your mon­i­tor.

To install,


1) Nav­i­gate to your Light­room pre­sets fold­er. The eas­i­est way to do this is to go to Lightroom’s pref­er­ences by click­ing the Light­room menu and choos­ing Pref­er­ences (PC: Edit > Pref­er­ences). Then choose the Pre­sets tab and click the “Show Light­room Pre­sets Fold­er” but­ton to open the Light­room Fold­er.

2) Now go into the Light­room Fold­er. Then go into the Local Adjust­ment Pre­sets fold­er.

3) UNZIP the file you down­loaded from the bot­tom of this post.

4) Copy and paste the “.lrtem­plate” files into the Local Adjust­ment Pre­sets fold­er.

5) Restart Light­room

To use, sim­ply select Adjust­ment Brush while you are in Devel­op mod­ule, or sim­ply tap the K key on the key­board. Select ‘Back­ground Dark­en-MF’ from the Effects drop­down. Sim­ply paint it over the back­ground for the effect. I also like to tog­gle Auto Mask for the edge detec­tion. You can also view the mask over­lay by tap­ping the O key.


Melvin’s LR4 Back­ground Adjust­ment Brush Pre­set