How to get the most out of the new LIGHTROOM masking | real world examples

a big thanks to squarespace for sponsoring this week's video [Music] morning everybody fantastic to see you all again i hope you enjoyed my thursday video um with pebbles and shooting with the nikon z9 that was such a great experience and it was really good fun shooting pebbles and fox uh i was going to go out and shoot some more woodland for this video but the weather here we've had some storms coming through the uk and it's so windy that shooting woodland would be really difficult to do so i thought what i'd do is i'd show you the new tools in lightroom and how i'm going to use those tools to edit a photo and i wanted to edit a photo from the island trip that i did the one which actually i can tell you now was it was meant to be a trip to shoot the nikon z9 but i got really ill when i was in ireland so i had to come home um so unfortunately i had to reschedule it but it was a blessing in disguise because if i hadn't come back and all i would have done was shoot waves in ireland and it was much better obviously shooting pebbles which was so much fun so i'm gonna um whilst it's throwing it down with rain outside really windy i'm gonna sit and show you how i would use the new tools and also how i'd edit this photo from ireland so let's get straight into it so basically i've got this image here and it's exposed pretty well the first thing i do on an image is i'll actually just mess about with the exposure so i did take bracketed images for this but to be honest i think it's fine as it is so if i just dial down the exposure you can see that i'm blowing out the sun there but that's not going to matter because i'm going to make that very sort of soft and very ethereal looking so there's going to be a really nice graduation from that so that's not going to matter too much and then if i go up i just want to have a look in the shadows and check there's no issues in the shadows and there isn't um i think they all look pretty good really so i'm quite happy with this it's a good exposure good thing to work on so we've obviously got this new tool bar up here and we've got this masking which i'm going to come into um it's effectively the same sort of tools that we had before there's a few improvements which i'll go through and how i'm going to use those but mostly it just helps you organize your masks and visualize your masks a lot better but first of all let's just start with a basic edit on this this this was such an amazing um evening by the way i led down on the grass here and i was i felt so ill um but it was such an amazing light that over the la over three hours i got all sorts of shots i got this one i got this one i got this one in the other direction um i got this shot all taken from the same spot so um this one was right at the end of the night where the sun just peeped out of this little gap you know that perfect light that you sort of dream of so um what i'm going to do is i'm going to do a basic edit so i'm not going to worry about burning this out at the moment because obviously i can dial that back later if i want to i'm just going to increase the exposure a little bit increase the contrast increase the shadows quite a bit i'm going to [Music] increase the clarity a little bit which i might dial back in some areas but i'm going to increase the overall clarity because i think this is going to pull out this a little bit better and i'm just gonna have a little bit of mess around with the curve i'm just gonna because it's my style i'm just gonna just increase the the the black level so that there's not a black black and then i'm just gonna dial down the curve a little bit here and then back up here and here just to add a little bit more contrast i might just play with the colors as well so certainly the luminance of the green i just want to increase the luminance of the green i've got to be careful with the orange because that's going to affect the sun so i don't want to mess about with that too much saturation i probably want to increase the saturation of the green as well i think that's a fairly good basic edit i've gone from there to there but there's a lot to do on this image so what i want to do is the main thing is this sun here i want to um make it larger because when i was there it was it it was such amazing conditions because it was so windy it was blowing all the sea up and creating this haze and create this really nice sort of glow from the sun so i want to try and recreate that so this is where i start using the tools so i'm going to go into one of the tools here you can set this mask button now i'm really rubbish at showing you how to use software so to actually use the software you better you look at somebody else's video but what i'm going to try and do is show you how i use that software to edit a photo so if you're just looking for software tutorial maybe go somewhere else but if you're looking for how i might use that software to edit my photo you're on a good video right so i'm going to do a um a radial gradient here right in the middle of the sun and i'm just going to do one like that now what's really good is that you can control the feather here and for the radial gradient but we've got this here which allows you to visualize it a little bit better so i want it to come right out from the middle and gradually fade away as it goes out to the edges so that's a good example of what i want and then what i'm going to do with that by the way as well you can also visualize that white on black so you can see exactly what it looks like a little bit like the masking in photoshop but i'm just going to leave the color overlay on and what i'm going to do is i'm just going to increase the exposure of that and then i'm going to decrease the clarity and decrease the dehaze so you can see i'm getting a little bit more glow now it's softening it down a little bit and that's what i want but it's gone very white so that's not good so i need to increase the temperature of it which is good and i'll probably increase the saturation a little bit and then i'm going to colorize it so this color button here allows me to colorize it i can do all sorts of weird things with this turn it all sorts of colors but what i want to do is i just want to get a ready orange here and just colorize it the reason i want to do that is i feel like it's it's it's important when you've got a burnt out area this is burnt out in the middle if i did this you can see that that's burnt out i don't want that to be pure white so i'm going to colorize it so it's it's just slightly off-white and that will help when i come to print it or anything else it'll have some some color to it so we're getting there with that um but the problem is but it's spreading out quite a long way i can probably actually increase the exposure a little bit more of it yeah so that that's good but it's it's spreading out a little bit too much so what i need to do now and this is where this is where this is really useful these new tools is that i want to just create an intersection with a luminosity mask so i'm just going to click the option button click intersect and then click luminance range and this sounds really complicated but what it allows me to do basically is i can say don't have this radial filter affect the darker tones so if i just move this to the right you can see that it's just not affecting the darker tones now that's right quite harsh but what you can do which is really clever now is i can say rather than just change the end point and start at this black and and go to this point here i can fade it in so i can move that back and keep this here so i can then fade in and get a very soft sort of feel to it so basically what i want to do is i want to say affect the blacks a little bit and then affect it more and more and more until it comes to the brighter tones so i get a really nice fade from this radial filter i put on here that's brightening up over this rock which is what you would get in reality because obviously as the light gets dispersed you're going to get less effect on on the rock around the corner here so you can do that and i can come back and mess about with that but i'll do that to about there so but then what's really clever is i can go back to the radial gradient here and i can move it out more so what i want to do now is i want to pull it out more to the left so what i can do is i can just pull it out to the left here and as you can see it's affecting the sky because that's sort of a mid-tone but it's not affecting these rocks here as much so it's almost looks like it's going behind this rock um and that just works really well and it's a fantastic way of dealing with sun and when you're shooting directly into the sun editing it afterwards and you can create a really really nice effect with it and it works perfectly for this this image i've just noted on noticed on this image that i've got a few spots sensor spots on so i'll just clean those up one thing i really liked about these they've known was the sensor shield just having that um shield when you're changing lenses i mean i wouldn't have all these spots i've had that which would have been pretty good but anyway let's get rid of them all it's quite a lot because i was really windy and i was changing my lens quite a bit just sat in this spot thinking i just want to be at home because i felt so ill right so there we go i've got rid of most of those i'm going to do a little bit more work on the sky now so i'm going to add that's this is one mask here that i've done you can see where it is i'm going to add another mask now a linear gradient and this linear gradient i'm going to apply to the sky and i'm going to darken the sky down probably add a bit of contrast maybe increase decrease the shadows a little bit i might warm it up a little bit yeah so that that's looking pretty good but i don't want this to impact this too much i want i so basically what i want to do is i want to create a linear gradient with a little bit of a curve in it so what i can now do to this linear gradient is i can subtract a radial gradient and if i just subtract a radial gradient that's like that one that i had before then you can see that that's just allowed that light to push into the sky and not darkened it too much so i've still got that sort of glowy feeling um so that's worked really well i'll probably add another one another linear gradient to the sky a little bit higher up just a slight angle this time i don't need to do the radial gradient and i'm just going to darken that even more i want to create quite a lot of impact here and then i might go back to this mask here and i'm just going to add a little bit more saturation so that's good that's um good for the sky now i want to do something to this area here so i want to sort of increase the texture in this and add a little bit more clarity to it so to do that i'm just going to use a brush and i just nothing really special i need to do here so i'm just going to go to the brush so i'll just um select a flow of about 25 so i have to apply it four times before i have the full effect i can i can limit that by lowering the density but i don't need to and then i'm just going to increase the exposure increase the whites and obviously i can dial this back later increase the shadows and increase the clarity and then i'm just going to paint on where i feel that i need that and i can go over in a few times if i need i think i need it basically what i want to do is just want to pull out some of these details in this rock um especially where the lighter tones are so i think that'll do maybe i can increase the exposure a little bit more add a bit of contrast and then increase the whites a bit yeah so that looks pretty good so let's have a look where we stand it's not looking bad i need to pull out a lot more um in the bottom area of it so i'm going to go to a linear gradient here put it on here and again i don't need to be too careful with this i don't think i'm just going to increase the exposure increase the contrast increase the shadows and make it a little bit warmer that's all i need to do i don't need to do anything particularly special there i think that looks pretty good um the other thing that i want to do is i just want to pull out some of the yellows and oranges in this highlighted bit here so again i'm just going to use a brush and i'm just going to brush on a little bit of exposure here so just in these bits just the highlights i mean it's not picking up a lot of the highlights but i just want to pull back that and also i'm just going to increase the clarity i just want to by increasing the clarity quite a lot i get that really nice sort of glow there so now i've got all my masks here i can visualize them i can hover over them and see what's happening um and i've done this rough and ready i'd spend a lot more time um fine-tuning this the only final one i want to do is i want to create a mask so i'm just going to do a color range for the c i'll just grab the c there now obviously that's similar to a lot of other colors i can refine that by just reducing it down and then that has just selected the c but i don't want to change this bit of c here so if i want to do that then obviously what i can do is i can just subtract use a radial gradient and i can invert it it sounds quite complicated but if i just do a radial gradient there you can see that that has subtracted the c well i don't want to do that i want to do the inverse of it so what i'm going to do is i'm just going to go invert and then that will just select this area of the c um and what i can now do is i can increase the exposure i can increase the contrast i can make it a little bit bluer or greener depending on what i think was going to be like maybe add a bit of saturation to it again i'm doing this really quick um maybe add a bit of clarity to it and it just makes it pop a little bit more so um i've done that fairly quick rough and ready but i think you get an idea of how you can combine masks the key thing is that with these masks you have the ability to use a brush a linear gradient a radial gradient a colour range and a luminance all independently or you can mix those together you can either subtract one or add one to to to the the total mask or you can intersect them and if you intersect them it deletes the bit um where or uses the bit where it's intersected so that's pretty good there is also select subject and select sky for landscapes i'm not sure about the select subject i mean if you click select subject on here it selects some random things so it's useless really and select sky i think works sometimes but to be honest i think you need to be a little bit more careful about how you do it so if it works that's fantastic but um i prefer to use the the gradient filter when i'm doing things with it with with the sky obviously i spend a lot more time on there i think the horizon might not be straight either a good way to check the horizon what i use is just zoom in and move it to the top um and just see if it's level with the top it's not so i might just want to just draw a line on that about there there we go that's right um i feel like just to finish it off it needs a radial gradient on the whole thing bit inverted so i'm now inverted that and then i can change this is so nice i really like this this interface i can just change that and reduce the exposure a little bit of the outside i'd obviously spend a lot more time editing this but we've gone from that to that by use of some of the gradient masks the radial masks the luminous masks and the color masks so i hope that's helped there's a winner from a competition a few videos ago of a couple of printed images from um ireland so i'll mention that in a minute before i do then i want to say thanks to this week's sponsor and that is squarespace um as you know squarespace has been a fantastic help to this channel but they're not just to help for me in terms of sponsoring the video they help me massively when i want to add things to my website like my calendar a little plug for my calendar um this is october's from next year so it looks one of my favorite images of all time this wise um but there's still a few left of that not many so if you want a calendar and get them quick but they allow me to put my calendar on my website squarespace and i i can honestly say it's the most useful tool that that i use now obviously i get my copy of squarespace for free and i'm sponsoring my channel but i would without a shadow of a doubt go back to squarespace and in fact i used squarespace way before they started sponsoring me and squarespace make it super easy if you just want to set up a portfolio to share your images you can control the sizes you can put high quality images up there you can make it look fantastic rather than just posting on instagram which is just so pathetic when it comes to image quality to be quite frank so make sure you do have a website and if you are going to use squarespace then you can get 10 off by using the offer code nigel or going to forward slash nigel okay on to the winner from the most liked comment uh from a few videos ago and that was kyle tunis for his brilliant idea of just going to a location blind no research or nothing so i don't know how i'm going to do that i just have to drive my car and think stop um but it's a good idea it's down in my list of videos to do so at some point i'll hopefully do that video but kyle well done if you reach out to me i'll send you those to prince in in the post and thanks for um sharing your idea in the comment um i've got another competition that i'm going to run to anybody that's signed up for my e-newsletter and the details of that will be in my e-newsletter the link's in the description below if you haven't signed up already um i also send out offers um of my masterclass and things like that but also tips and images that i don't share elsewhere okay that's it for this week's video i hope you've enjoyed it hopefully the weather's going to improve and all the leaves won't have blowing off the trees here in the uk because it has been a pretty horrendous week and i can't wait to do some woodland photography until next sunday bye

Channel: Nigel Danson

Views: 59,666

Rating: 4.943603 out of 5

Keywords: photography, lightroom, lightroom tutorial, lightroom tips, lightroom masking, lightroom masks, new Lightroom masks, nigel danson

Id: XPtDhjJVoyg

Length: 19min 11sec (1151 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 31 2021