Everything You Need to Know About Masking in Lightroom Classic

hi I'm Julianne cost in the next few minutes I'm going to teach you everything I know about masking in Lightroom classic so in order to access the different masking options I can either click on the mask icon in the develop module or I can use shift plus W to open or close the mask panel there are a number of different types of masks select subject Sky background objects and people are all based on artificial intelligence and machine learning there's also manual masks such as the brush linear gradient and Radial gradient and there are three range masks color luminance and depth range we're going to start by selecting the brush or we could use the keyboard shortcut K in order to access it we see that the masking panel appears we can reposition this anywhere in the image area or even to a secondary monitor or we can dock it with all of the different adjustments for now I will drag it back out we can also collapse or expand it let's take a look at the different brush options I'll use the disclosure triangle we can use the size slider to change the size or the feather which will change the edge softness there's also the flow slider which sets the speed at which the brush applies the adjustment as well as the density slider which will cap the amount of the adjustment that can be applied if I want to use keyboard shortcuts I can use the left bracket key in order to get a smaller size brush or the right bracket key in order to get a larger brush if I add the shift key then I can either reduce or increase the feather or Edge softness I can use the numeric keys to set the flow amount if I tap five I'll get fifty percent six will go to 60 if you type quickly like 7 8 you can get 78 or tap 0 to get a hundred percent I want to darken down the rocks in the upper left so I'll go ahead and start painting over them we can see that as I start painting I get this red overlay by default if I want to change the color we can click in the color swatch and then choose a color here or use any of the default colors we can also change the opacity and determine whether the overlay shows the affected or the unaffected areas there are also a number of different overlay modes which we'll talk about in just a moment for now I'll set it back to red and then to darken those rocks I'll decrease the exposure slider now as soon as I do that you'll notice that that red overlay disappears if I want to view it again I can tap the o key to toggle the visibility of the overlay or we can use the show overlay option in The Masks panel I also want to point out that there is a pin icon that was set down and if I tap o to hide the overlay when I position my cursor over the pin it will automatically toggle the visibility of that overlay all right I'll tap o in order to show it if you paint in an area and you want to remove that from the area that's being affected we can switch to the Eraser tool then I'll simply paint in that area to remove it from the area that's being affected if I don't want to switch back and forth between the brush and the Eraser I can simply hold down the option key in order to toggle between the two all right I'm going to reposition the mask for a moment I also want to darken this area but I don't want to do it with my flow set to 100 so I'll tap the 4 key to set the flow to 40 percent and that will enable me to start painting in this area to slowly build up the adjustment I'll do the same right over here and then I'll hold down the option key but when I change to the Eraser the flow goes back up to a hundred percent because that's what the Eraser was set to so I'm going to decrease the flow and then just remove a little bit of the effect in this area I'll tap the o key again in order to hide the overlay and we can toggle the effect of the Mask so there's before and there's after if we want to view the different overlay modes we can either click on the Swatch again and then select them from the list or we can use the more icon in order to move through them or on the toolbar we can choose from the drop down list so one of the overlays that I like is the white on black I'll tap o in order to view that and here we can see where the mask is showing us white those are the areas that are going to be completely affected and then where the mask is gray where I was painting with that decreased flow it's going to be less affected by the change that I made to exposure all right let's set that back to color overlay and if I want to cycle through those overlay modes I can hold down the option key on Mac or the ALT key on Windows and just tap the o key in order to cycle through them if I wanted to cycle through those default color swatches here then I would hold down the shift key and tap o to cycle through them all right for now I'll tap the o key to hide the overlay and let's go ahead and just reposition The Masks panel up here all right a few additional shortcuts for the brush tool the forward slash key will toggle between brush a and brush B these two options here in the brushes area this can be convenient if you have two very different sets of options that you often toggle between because you can set one brush up with one set of options and the other with the other set the brush also has an invert option I can either check it here which will invert the mass so all of the other areas are affected or we can tap the apostrophe to toggle the invert option now if you want to see all the shortcuts that are associated with masking we can click on the question mark on The Masks panel and then reference the pop-up all right if I ever want to rename a mask when I hover over the mask I can use the more icon and choose rename or I can simply double click on the name of the Mask if I want to toggle the visibility of the Mask I can click on the icon next to the mask and if I want to see the components that make up the mask I'll click on the mask and we can see that this mask has one component the brush one and that's important to point out because a mask can be made up of several different components which we'll take a look at in just a moment we can also use the more icon either next to the component or next to the mask itself to invert it to duplicate and invert a mask to intersect The Mask which again we'll talk about in a few minutes to duplicate hide delete or delete all masks all right let's add a second mask I'll choose the brush again I want to darken down the foreground I'm going to set the flow all the way back up to 100 and increase the feather and get a little bit larger of a brush size then I'll click and paint and we can see that red overlay again in this area here of the water now every time we select a tool all of the adjustments are going to be reset by default if you want to change that behavior you can uncheck reset sliders automatically I'll go ahead and leave that on and I'm going to decrease the exposure a little bit I'll add a little bit of dehaze which also adds some saturation so I'll remove that and I'll also add some noise reduction because dehaze typically amplifies the noise in the image if you've used a number of different sliders to create your adjustment and you feel that the adjustment is either a little bit too much or too little you can always use the amount slider to either reduce or increase the amount of the effect I'm going to add one more brush mask this time I want to decrease the exposure down here in the water so I'll just paint over that area and then decrease the exposure a little bit but also take down the highlights as well as the white I'm going to cool that down a little bit by just adding a little bit of blue as well as a little bit of green and then just just decrease the overall amount a bit when I position my cursor over the image area we can see the pins for each one of these different adjustments and if I ever need to reposition one I can click and drag in order to move it I'll use command Z in order to undo that the nice thing about having the pins visible is that I can also click on any other pin in order to automatically select that mask which can be really handy especially if you haven't named your masks if you find the pins to be too distracting you can either change when the pins are displayed by using the drop down menu here at the toolbar or we can use the more icon in order to set that option as well as whether or not to show The unselected Mask pins all right let's go ahead and move to this next image of the Fallen birch tree and I'm going to add a linear gradient in order to lighten the left side of the image I can click and drag to the right everything at the beginning of the linear gradient is the area that's going to be affected then it's going to slowly fade until we reach this white line here and then to the right of that nothing will be affected if I need to reposition this I can grab the pin or I can change the length of the gradient by clicking on either of the two outer lines if I need to rotate it I'll position my cursor above the middle line and then drag or we can use the little handle here if I ever need to invert it I can use that same shortcut the apostrophe or we can check the invert option at the top of the adjustments all right let's increase the exposure a bit I'll also increase the shadows and then just change both the temperature as well as the tint sliders now while I like the overall adjustment I don't want it to affect the birch tree so I'm going to add a secondary component to the mask I want to subtract the birch tree from this linear gradient so I'll choose subtract and then select the brush then I'll get a little bit smaller of a brush as well as decrease the feather and then paint over the area that I don't want to be affected in this case I want to make sure that I get some of this lichen so that it's not affected and its color temperature isn't changed like the rest of the area in the gradient now if I position my cursor over the mask for the linear gradient we can see an overview of that mask and when I position my cursor over the preview of the brush we see that mask and if I take the linear gradient and then subtract this what we end up with is the preview we're seeing now when I position my cursor over the thumbnail for the mask the advantage to this is we can adjust either the brush or the linear gradient independently from one another so if I needed to reposition the gradient or if I wanted to rotate it or maybe make it a little bit smaller I can and it doesn't affect the brush component at all if I ever wanted to reposition all of the components in a mask at one time I could click on the mask icon and then select any of the pins to move them as one unit I'll use command Z on Mac control Z on Windows to undo that if I ever needed to delete a single Mass component then I'd make sure to click on the mask and use the more icon next to the component to delete brush one or whatever the component was to delete the entire mask I used the more icon next to the mask all right let's move to the next image of the Dune and I want to add a radial gradient I'm going to use command minus to zoom out a bit and then drag out the radial gradient I can then resize the gradient even beyond the image area I can rotate it I can use the middle pin in order to reposition it but in this case when I make a change we can see that the change is going to happen inside of the radial gradient so I can tap the apostrophe or click to invert it I can also change the amount of feather from a very hard Edge to a soft Edge I'll reposition that a little bit more and then we can zoom back in and I'll adjust the temperature slider to make it a little bit more blue now I like the effect around this area but if we toggle the visibility of the Mask we can see that we've lost some of the yellow in the foreground so I'll use the subtract option to select a linear gradient and then click and drag into the image to subtract this area from the radial gradient while I like this effect I also want to show you that just because you've subtracted an area doesn't mean that you can't add it back in so I'll choose add select the brush make sure that I have a large feather on the brush and get a large size brush and decrease the flow then starting over on the right side I'm going to start painting to just build up a little bit more or reveal a little bit more of that radial gradient down along the bottom and the more I paint over a specific area the more I'll build up or add back in that adjustment so again I now have the radial gradient but I'm subtracting the linear gradient component and then adding back in the brush to create this composite mask to toggle the visibility of the Mask we'll use the eye icon there's before and there's after all right let's move to the next image of the pairs and I'll fit that in window and start by selecting all three pairs I'll choose subject and Lightroom classic we'll use AI in order to select all three of those pairs and then I'll just change the temperature if I ever want to select the inverse of the subject I can either use the more icon and duplicate and invert the mask or we can just create a new mask and select background that's going to be the invert of selecting the subject for now I don't need that so I'll delete it and I want to select just this middle pair I'll click the plus icon choose objects and this tool has two different modes there's a brush mode and a rectangle selection mode use the rectangular Marquee and then drag the Marquee over the pair and when I release the cursor Lightroom classic will shrink wrap that to the object let's go ahead and change the hue if you want to use the fine adjustment you can toggle that on so that you can be more accurate or you can just hold down the option key on Mac or the ALT key on Windows to temporarily turn it on in order to move the cursor in smaller increments to remove the adjustment from the stem I'll use subtract select brush make sure the flow is set up high reduce the amount of feather as well as the brush size and then paint over the stem now I also want to reduce some of the effect in the pair but I don't want to mess with this mask so I'll use the subtract option again choose the brush increase the feather size as well as the size of the brush and decrease the flow amount then I'll start painting right over here in order to subtract the adjustment from this bottom area of the pair so that what we're left with is just a highlight at the top in that nice warmer color all right to take down the highlights here in the napkin I'll add another object's mask select the rectangle and then just drag my cursor over the napkin then I'll decrease the highlights and also remove some of the blue tint by decreasing the saturation then I want to lighten a portion of the background so I'll use command minus to zoom out add another mask by selecting the brush option making sure that my flow is set all the way up as well as the feather and then I'll click once in the upper left of the image then I'm going to increase the brush size hold down the shift key and click again and Lightroom will connect those two dots and interpolate the size of the brush between them then I'll increase the exposure but we can see it's also affecting the pair in the foreground so I'll choose subtract and subtract the subject but it's still affecting this wooden area so I'll choose subtract again select the brush get a much smaller brush and then paint in the wood in order to hide the effect if I ever want to reposition the paint stroke I can always select the pin and then reposition it all right let's move to the next image and I'll choose to fit in window and then select sky then I'll just decrease the exposure a bit add a little bit of texture a little bit more clarity and just a bit of dehaze and noise reduction I'll also want to desaturate it I just prefer the skies to be a bit more muted then in order to select everything that's not Sky I'll use the three dots and choose duplicate and invert the mask with the foreground element selected I'll increase the temperature increase the shadows as well as lift the blacks in order to give it a softer feel all right if you're working with images that have people in them Lightroom can automatically detect people in an image when it does you will get an icon for each of the people that it detects down here and clicking on the person will then display additional mask options so I can make one mask for the entire person or I can make individual masks or combined any of these masks together here I'm going to create seven separate masks and let's walk through some of the individual attributes I'll go ahead and zoom in and for the face skin I'm going to decrease the texture a little bit then I'll move to Mask two which is the body skin which would be any skin that's not the face skin and in this image it works really well because not only can I decrease the texture but I can also decrease the exposure which will just darken down the neck placing more emphasis on the face all right mask three is going to be the eyebrows we could decrease or increase the exposure there or if Lightroom creates a mask that you don't want you can always delete that mask mask 4 is going to be the eye sclera that's the whites of the eyes I'll just increase that exposure a tiny bit and mask five is the iris and pupil I'm going to add a little bit of dehaze to darken the darkest values but then increase the exposure in order to add some contrast and the combination of both the iris and the pupil as well as the eye sclera can just help make a person look more alert all right Mass 6 is going to be the lips let's just change the lip color a little bit and maybe make it a little darker and then the last mask 7 is going to be the hair mask here I will just increase the exposure a bit and decrease the saturation however I think there are some areas here that are getting a bit too bright so like any of the other masks that we've made all of these AI masks can be combined with any other component so I'll use subtract select the brush decrease the flow and then just paint over the areas that are a little bit too bright all right let's zoom out a bit to toggle off and on the visibility of all of The Masks we can click on the switch at the top of the masks panel so there's before and after all right moving on to range masking I want to select this next image and I want to demonstrate two ways to use this tool because I think it really depends on how you think for some it's going to be easiest to start with the range so I'll choose color range and I'll automatically get an eyedropper which I can click with in order to select a color range I can also add the shift key in order to add to that selection I can add up to five additional points or we can click and drag in order to select a color range we can then refine that color range using the refine slider moving it to the left will tighten the color range so fewer colors are added moving it to the right will expand it let's go ahead and make a change to the Hue slider and we can see that all of the reds are being changed in the entire image so this is very similar to using the Hue saturation and Luminosity panel but if you want to restrict this so that it only affects a portion of the image we can choose subtract then select another tool like the brush tool increase the flow decrease the feather and then just paint anywhere that we want to subtract that color range from having an effect so that's one way to think about it I'm going to hide the visibility of that layer for a moment and approach it from a different way this time I'll start by adding the brush and I'll just paint over the red area here in the sign because that's what I want to affect but that didn't take me very long I did a very loose painting over it so what I want is within that paint stroke that I made I want Lightroom classic to only change the Reds within that stroke but I can't do that with add or subtract I need to do it with an intersection so I can either use the more icon and choose intersect mask with and then select the tool or you can hold down the option key on Mac or the ALT key on Windows and choose intersect and then select the tool in this case I choose color range so I'm telling Lightroom classic within that paint stroke I only want you to affect the color that I've targeted and now we can see that Lightroom classic is only affecting the Reds within that paint stroke looks like I didn't quite paint enough so I'll return to the brush and then just paint over these areas here all right moving to the next image I want to talk about luminance range masking so you would use a luminance range Mass to target areas in an image based on the brightness values that you want to affect so before we make any changes I'm going to return to the edit stack and I want to increase my Shadows now let's zoom in to a hundred percent and we can see that in the shadow areas we've added a lot of noise so if I reset that that's before but by increasing my shadows I'm increasing the noise in that shadow area so I'll return to the masks add a luminance range mask and then use the eyedropper in order to select the range that I want to mask so I'll click in the dark areas here and we can see over on the right there's a rectangular area and that's the area that's going to be affected a hundred percent by whatever it is I do I can make that wider or more narrow and then the distance between that Tab and this line which is controlled by this slider is going to be the fade range and by increasing that fade range you can avoid an Abrupt transition between those areas that are adjusted and those that are not we can toggle on the luminance map if we want to see that that might just be a better visualization of the areas that are going to be affected and of course this isn't limited to your shadows I can reposition this anywhere so as I move it over to the right now my mid-tones would be affected if I move it all the way to the right now it's my highlights then I could pull it out the other direction and add the fade range all right let's toggle off the luminance map but you should know if you hold down the option key or the ALT key and you drag any of these sliders it will temporarily show that map again all right I'll use the eyedropper tool in the image area to select those darker values again and then I'll scroll down and I'm going to increase the noise reduction so if you watch in this area right here if I reset it that's before and then as I move it over to the right we're reducing that noise now I could have done this globally but that would have made the rest of the mud too smooth all right let's take a look at depth range masking so depth range masks select areas in an image based on their distance from the camera and they're available for photos that have embedded depth map data as of right now that's going to be limited to heic files captured on Apple iPhones using the portrait mode I'll select range and then depth range let's zoom out on this image and we see a similar interface over here on the right and I have an eyedropper tool so when I click on the bird of paradise we get a visual representation of areas in the image based on their distance from the camera so I'm going to desaturate this area and then let's make some adjustments again the rectangular area here is going to be fully affected by the adjustments if I reposition it then different areas become affected if I move it all the way over to the right now we can see the items that were furthest from the camera are now in grayscale I want to leave the bird in color so I will pull this tab in order to make the area that is affected larger and then I'll drag out a fade range so we don't see any abrupt transitions if I want to see the depth map I can preview it we can see the dark red areas are being affected whereas the white area is not all right before we wrap up I want to talk about four different ways to automate your editing workflow and we're going to start with auto sync so in order to apply auto sync I need more than one image targeted I'll select this portrait that we already worked on and select a second image then I'll enable auto sync so that any edits that I make on one image will also be made on the other selected images including masking now if any of the selected files already have masks adding new masks is always going to be additive so it's going to add the mask to the stack it won't replace the mask and if you add a mask that's based on artificial intelligence The Mask will be calculated for each image independently so in this case I'm going to use the plus icon to choose select background I'll go ahead and increase the exposure and even though the images are different it's gone ahead and recalculated the mask and adjusted it accordingly now if you apply an AI mask to an image for example the select sky and the image doesn't have a sky Lightroom classic will still create the mask but they'll be a little warning next to it and you'll also see a little message at the top of the adjustments all right let's toggle that off and what if I only have one image selected and then I move to another image and decide that I want to apply all of the effects from the previously selected image then I would choose previous however it's going to apply everything and while it applies the AI masks and there automatically adjusted we can see in this image it doesn't work because it also applied the crop so I'm going to undo that and return to that first image this time I'll choose copy so that I can select exactly what settings I want to copy in this case all of the masking I'll copy that move to the next image and then choose paste and Lightroom classic will automatically re-render all of those masks now one thing you'll want to be aware of if you have any masks that have multiple components like the AI mask for the hair but also this brush component you might need to go in and select that brush and either reposition it or maybe delete it and then redo it and finally presets they're an amazing way to store any number of settings that you apply to one image so that you can apply them to additional images now if we include an AI mask in one of these presets then what we'll be creating is an Adaptive preset and you can see that some Ship by default with Lightroom classic there are adaptive presets for portrait as well as sky and subject and if I hover my cursor over these we can see some of the different effects so to create our own preset I'll choose Sky then decrease the exposure a bit increase the clarity as well as dehaze decrease the saturation and increase the noise reduction then let's give it a name and then we can create our preset I'll click the plus icon choose create preset name it save it in my adaptive presets group and select masking I'll also keep the support amount slider enabled because that will enable me to create a preset that when I move to another image and I apply that preset I can then use this amount slider in order to decrease or increase the effect of the preset so there you have it masking in Lightroom classic I'm Julianne cost thanks for watching

Channel: Julieanne Kost

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Id: xnECvQ0wNBU

Length: 31min 10sec (1870 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 18 2022