One of the few things I’ve rarely heard mentioned about the advantages of the localized corrections Brush in Lightroom 2 is the fact that you can use them to “undo” portions of an image that you’ve used the Develop Modules general commands to adjust.

All you have to do is to make the overall adjustment you want to make. Then, if a portion of it is too dark, too saturated, too sharp, or whatever, you can choose either the Graduated Filter or the Localized Adjustment Brush, set it to the “opposite” of whatever the settings were that made the original…and to whatever degree…and then just paint it to reverse or lessen the original effect. The “corrective” possibilities are so flexible that you can achieve nearly infinite variations in the end result.

For instance, you could soften an entire photo by dragging the Basic Panel’s Clarity slider way to the left. Then you could sharpen areas such as lips and eyelashes with a Localized Adjustment Brush Custom setting that had whatever combination of Contrast, Saturation, Clarity, and Sharpness you wanted. Or you could change the color balance of the entire image and then use a Color Tint to “re-balance” certain portions of the image.

In the image below, you see a close-up of fruits at a fruit stand in the Develop Module’s Before and After mode. The “Before” is actually what the image looked like after Vibration and Saturation were used to make the colors scream. Then the Graduated Filter was used diagonally to desaturate the colors in a sort of “semi-vignette.” Then the Localized Correction Brush was used to darken and Saturate the two green veggies at top and bottom right. You can just brush over them and then adjust the sliders to get exactly the effect you want by clicking on the brush dot to activate it. In fact, you can adjust any of the sliders to get any effect you want. Try that in Photoshop and see how many years it takes to get the same result 