Today’s Question: Is it possible to paint a color on an image in Lightroom Classic? I had an image with strange looking color streaks and wanted to use the color picker to select another color to paint over the streaks with and couldn’t figure out how.
Tim’s Quick Answer: Yes, you can paint a color into an image using the Brush option in Masking within Lightroom Classic, using the Color option among the targeted adjustment options.
More Detail: Among the various adjustments available with the Masking feature in Lightroom Classic is the Color option, which I find is often overlooked by photographers. With this adjustment you can add a color overlay to areas of an image defined by a mask.
To get started, you could add a new mask for the Brush option, so that you’re able to paint the intended adjustment into the image. If this includes the desire to add a color to specific areas of the photo, you can click on the color swatch rectangle to the right of the Color label at the bottom of the Color section of the targeted adjustment options. This will bring up the color picker, where you can select a color. You also select a color from the image itself by clicking within the gradient on the color picker, keeping the mouse button down, and dragging to the area of the image where you want to sample the color before releasing the mouse button.
You can then paint over the applicable area of the image to paint with the selected color. After painting, you can click the color swatch again to bring up the color picker so you can refine the color. You may also find it necessary to adjust the overall tonality or fine-tune other adjustments to get the area to blend in better with the surrounding image. But painting a color into specific areas of an image can most certainly be part of that process.
