How to Apply Luminance Adjustment Selectively in Lightroom or Photoshop

Question

I am fairly new to Lightroom and Photoshop so perhaps my workflow is poor or I am thinking this the wrong way. Regardless, I will really appreciate any insight you all can provide me!

I have a single image that I am trying to do some correction on the sky to. In Lightroom I am using the Color > Blue > Luminance > -100 option to remove a lot of the over exposed blue in the sky, which gives me just the effect I am after (Original | Edited). The problem is that Lightroom only allows that adjustment globally which affects the other blue aspects of my image. Knowing this I figured I would be able to make the adjustment in Photoshop instead.

Using the "Edit in Photoshop" option within Lightroom, I have brought the photo into Photoshop, but cannot find a suitable way to achieve the same effect to the sky as I did in Lightroom. It seems there isn't a luminance control on specific color like there is in Lightroom. I can make a selection/mask for just the sky and apply various effects such as hue/saturation and curves, but none of them get anywhere near the result I get in Lightroom with the luminance on blues being at -100.

My next thought was that I could bring one version with the sky untouched into Photoshop, go back to Lightroom and adjust the blue luminance to -100, then bring that version also into Photoshop as a new layer on the first version, but that isn't working. Creating a virtual copy and applying the luminance adjustment to it, selecting both versions in Lightroom, and using the "Edit In > Open as layers in Photoshop" results in only one image on a single layer. Doing just the same, but choosing "Edit in Photoshop" instead results in both versions being on two different projects, not the same one. Since I don't have saved files of the two versions from Lightroom, I can't import or place both into the same project from within Photoshop either.

I'm out of ideas and my Googlefu is turning up nothing helpful. Is there a way to selectively apply the luminance adjustment only to the sky in Lightroom or remove the adjustment from the areas I don't want it to apply to? Is there a better way in Photoshop that would achieve the same effect or a way to import both versions from Lightroom into Photoshop under the same project? Again, I appreciate any insight anyone can provide! Thanks!

Answer 1

I found a good way to do what I needed. Here is what I did:

I made a virtual copy of my image without the luminance adjustment, made the -100 adjustment to blue on that copy and left the original alone, selected both and opened both in Photoshop. Opening both in Photoshop put them on different projects. From there, I made a selection of the sky on the image that I wanted, copied it to a new layer, moved that layer from to the other project which contained the image without the sky I wanted. I then moved the selection into the sky for a perfect overlap, used a black layer mask to hide that from my underlying image, and then "painted in" my new sky using a white brush with a soft edge. It worked perfectly and without me saving an image, importing it again, editing it, and saving it once more.

Answer 2

NIK Viveza allows you to recolor any part of the image desired. Works as a plugin for Lightroom and for Photoshop.