This one confuses me a lot too.

Stewart

I once picked up a tip from David Ziser (on his video-blog, I think) about using the Adjustment Brush with Auto Masking in a way that you can minimize the halo-effect. It doesn’t always work, but it could be worth trying.
You start by selecting the adjustment brush with the settings you want (decrease exposure, …) but turn OFF auto masking. This will of course mean that you will paint into the building and other areas that you don’t want to, but you don’t care about that for now.
When you are finished with this, you change the brush to erase-mode and turn ON auto mask. Then you start to delete the parts where the adjustment shouldn’t be. In this way the auto mask works from “the other side”, so to speak, and could yield a better result.

Looking forward to the rest of this project! Thank you!
/Fredrik

I usually start with the lens correction panel when doing my editing. Is there any danger to doing that first vs. later?

You mentioned using the color temp slider to bring some blue back into the sky as you had warmed the photo earlier. I sometimes do this as well and I also find using the blue slider in the luminance tab of the HSL panel a great option for adding some more color back.

Just wanted to let you know I’m really enjoying your series. Interesting idea. LR is great, but without layers and a more complete set of selection capability and tools, PS looks like an indispensable piece of the flow. But its pretty cool to see how much you can do without it. When you do an end-of-month wrap-up, I’ll be interested to see if you thought you ever needed anything beyond Elements.

Thanks Matt. I am not as familiar with that function yet, and it should be very useful. Seems pretty powerful in your example!