- I usually don't get
this excited for updates, but the newest Lightroom 11 updates, seriously, has my mind blown. If you're a portrait or
wedding photographer, you need to know about this, because it is a game changer
in the way that we edit. And in today's Edit
Together Tuesday video, I'm gonna be sharing a breakdown
into the new masking tool, along with some cool ninja tricks, and also how you can use
it to transform your images while also shaving hours
off of your editing time. I am so pumped to share
this with you today. So let's not waste any time and dig on in. So hopping into Lightroom,
under the develop area, one of the very first things I noticed was that the menu in the
upper right-hand corner, underneath the histogram, which used to house the
local adjustment brush tools, which looked like this,
our little brush tool and our radial and linear gradient tools, now looks a little bit different. Instead of those tools
being right within the menu, we now have this circle icon
called the masking menu. And if we were to click it, we'll notice that our
brush and gradient tools are now nested under
this new masking menu. It also includes our range masks, which I have a previous video I did on color range masks for portraits, which is a really cool
tool that used to be a little bit more hidden inside Lightroom, and it now has extra capabilities and is also featured, which is nice. But what I'm really excited to talk about is the new select subject
and select sky tools. And if we come over to a photo here, these tools are really cool 'cause it's using artificial intelligence to auto select the
subject or the background. This is something that was
previously inside Photoshop, and it's now available
right within Lightroom, making this a total game changer. So for this photo here, say I wanted to do something
only impacting the background. I really love the skin
tone of the subjects, but say I wanted an icier green, kind of a cool filmic
green in the background while keeping the subjects the same. Something that I could do
to really quickly do this is use the new select subject tool. And Lightroom will
automatically go to work, selecting the subject using
that artificial intelligence. And if we zoom in here, I
mean, just look at this. Like it gets all the
little hairs, it's so cool. I mean, even just like those
little details of his beard, it's insane. Something like this would
be really hard to do and very time consuming to do. So it's pretty crazy,
it just gets it perfect. Down to like the little micro details. So in order to get this
mask onto the background, very simple, all we
have to do is come over to this little button here,
Invert, and we will check that. And now we have a perfect
selection of the background, isolating our subjects, so that none of the changes
happened to the subject. And then I can begin tweaking. So just like what we would
do with our brush tools or our gradient tools, we can
come over and begin tweaking. And once you start tweaking,
the mask disappears so that you can see what you're
doing, which is really nice. So I can come down and just
do a couple quick tweaks to the background. And if I were to come up to
our mask, which is right here, this is kind of a little
pop-up that gets created when we create a new mask. And you can see my mask right here. And there's a little
eyeball where I can preview and click it on and
off, to see what I did. For our overlay, if you
want to show the overlay, you can also check box this
show overlay on or off, or use keyboard shortcut
O, to it any time. See your overlay or take it away. There's also this box
with more mask controls. I've changed my mask to
pink, as you can see. By default it's red, or you can pick any sort of custom color. You can also adjust
the opacity up or down, or you have the option to
go image on black and white, or different overlay options. And what this is nice for is you can really see what's
happening with your mask. So if you want a quick check of if any areas are not how
they're supposed to be, you can use that to do so. Come over to another image example. And this time we're gonna go Select Sky, in order to bring in some of
that sky detail that is there without impacting the rest of the photo. And as you can see, it quickly
brings back in that sky, get a little bit of blue up in there. So as you can see, these can really quickly
supercharge your workflow, with these one click selections that make for super easy adjustments. But I also want to share
some kind of ninja tricks, using this new tool to
take it even further. First is the ability to fine
tune your mask selection. So if we were to come back over
and create a new mask here, we'll go brush tool. So for this image, something
that would be fun to do is brush in a little bit of
extra haze into that background. In this scenario, the sun
went down really early 'cause we were very
close to those mountains. It went down probably about 45, 50 minutes before this photo was taken. So it was actually pretty dark, and it lost a little bit of that magic that we get from the sun. So by quickly making a
little brush adjustment here, I can come in, maybe bring
up those shadows a bit, bring up the warmth. And I'm just gonna very messily, just brush this over the mountains and the background here. And make a few quick little adjustments to warm up the image. And so now we have a very like loose brush on our background, but it's
also getting the subject. So this is the power of the subtract tool. So here you see, I have my
selection, I can go Subtract. And I just want to get
rid of these subjects. And voila, now I have a perfect mask of just that area I painted,
without the subjects in it. So if we were to toggle
this off and back on again, as you can see, it just
pops my bride and groom right off of that background, giving that extra bit of warmth and life that we lost with the sun being down. You can also do this to refine your mask. So if I were to create a new mask here, and let's do Select Subject again, and it's detecting our subject. And here you can see that it
didn't get a perfect mask, it actually left out an arm over here, a little hand here and a bouquet here. So I know I'm gonna invert this. So we're gonna go ahead
and invert it in advance. And then we can come back in over here, and say, Subtract, Brush. You can also do it the opposite way, where you can add, if you want
the mask to be on the girls. But in this case, I want to
alter the background again. So you're actually going
to want to invert it first, if you're altering the background. Or if you're doing the people, you can use the addition brush. But you want to get the
selection proper first, and then do any sort of
addition or subtraction. And it works a little bit easier that way. So that's a little pro
tip that I figured out. It's hard to invert it if you've already done your adjustments and fine tuning before inverting. But now I can just very quickly go and make those few adjustments to fix up my mask a little
bit here, in the areas where Lightroom got a little
bit confused with the AI, which is probably because of the shrubbery in the background. And that looks pretty good. And now I can come in and do any of the adjustments I wanted, if I wanted to like
haze up this background a little bit more, and just
give it a little bit more of that hazy light and airy look. Which it already has,
because it was shot that way, but it's just emphasizing it
and bringing it out even more. Another cool thing is, you might notice that this mask menu kind of
starts to get in your way. You can either make it
smaller, by doing that. Or you can actually drag this
mask menu right into here, and now it lives within the side panel so that it's not in your way while you're editing your images. So we'll go ahead and come over and toggle that off and back on again. And you can see it just pops them off with the background even more. And gives even more of that dreamy, light and airy look that we love. So next up, I want to
talk about intersection, and show an example with color range. So for this image here of my
bride and groom's first look, I really loved this train of her dress. And say I wanted to bring that
out a little bit more even. One of the ways that we can do this is with the intersection tool, which is something that
you might not use as often. It might be more of a case by case basis, but it's good to know what it does, because it can come in handy
if you know how to use it. So we'll go ahead and do Select Subject to get that nice mask
of our bride and groom. And then from there, I'm
gonna come into the ... menu, and choose Intersect Mask with, Color Range. And what this does is it
gives us a color range mask, and I'm actually going to come and click, choosing the color from her dress. And as you can see, this gets her dress, but it also gets the
sky, some of the ground, some of the other areas
as well, on the image. We'll come in and we'll refine this. So really we're just going
to pay attention to them because the rest doesn't matter. So with intersection,
the power of this tool is it is selecting two things, right? It is selecting our subject and it's also selecting the color range. And the intersection is where both of those things are selected. So even though the color range is getting the sky in the background, because we have the
people selected as well, it's only looking at the color range within the parameters of those people, which perfectly selects her dress. So I think that looks pretty good there. And then after we have that, we'll go ahead and pop this menu back out so we can see a little bit better. And you can move this
anywhere, by the way, you can move it over here if you like, keep it here. And then I'm just going to
add a little bit of clarity, and bring those highlights
down a little bit as well. Pop up that clarity a bit. And typically, I don't use
clarity on a lot of images. I hate clarity on skin. It's
not good for skin tones. Especially like people
use clarity for softening, the texture tool and other
tools are much better for this. Clarity can do some funky
things with skin tones. But in this instance, it
does a really good job at bringing that contrast
and that little bit of pop into our dress here. So let's go ahead and do
quick before and after. And it's pretty subtle. But if we zoom in here, you can see, it just gives
us that little extra pop in the detail of that dress. All right, I have one more
thing I want to share, and I've saved the best for last. This is probably my favorite
of all of the new features and that's the ability to
batch sync the AI settings. This has the ability
to completely speed up our workflow when editing, especially as portrait
and wedding photographers, when we're batching hundreds of images. Here I have that very first image, that we tweaked the background on. I have a few other
similar images down below. If I were to select all four of the images and press synchronize, I'm gonna select Check None, so that it gets rid of
all of the selections. And then we're just going
to select the masking to select that mask. And synchronize that
across all four images. And we'll go ahead and select Replace, so that it makes it just that mask. And let's come over to one of
those other images we synced. And so the only thing with this is it doesn't automatically
show the settings. You have to come up and click the mask, and do Update. So that it can go ahead and
recompute for each image. I'm assuming Lightroom
will probably update this in the future, so that
we don't have to do this. But it's as simple as coming
over to each of these images and just clicking Update
and then Lightroom's AI will go through and make
that individual mask of each subject in those images, even as the subjects move
and change in the image. It used to be that you wouldn't want to copy your adjustment settings over, unless it was like in
an area like the sky, but even that is tricky
because different croppings in the image, different
movement of the subject is going to impact that. But now with this AI powered tool, where it's figuring out the
different sky in each photo, it's figuring out how the
subjects move in each image, you're now able to very powerfully copy these adjustment settings
across multiple images. So this right here is magic. This is a game changer for portrait and wedding photographers who are editing big batches of images. So what do you think of the new updates? I'd love to know your
thoughts, drop them below. And let me know if you have any questions or any areas that you'd
like me to dive deeper on, and I may share them in a
future video in this series. If you enjoy this, be sure
to give it a thumbs up, and tap that subscribe button, or share this out with a friend. Your support means the world to me, and I can't wait to catch
you in the next video.
