Lightroom 11 Update: New Masking Tools

this is an update video to explain some changes to lightroom classic that came out in version 11 released in october of 2021. now if you're using an older standalone version of lightroom this won't affect you since this only applies to the subscription version and if you are using the subscription version and you're thinking of installing this update you may discover as i did that you need to upgrade your computer operating system before you can even install version 11 of lightroom now upgrading my os is not something that i take lightly but the new features in this update in my view are totally worth it at least if you do a lot of editing in lightroom these are the first major feature changes in lightroom in a long time and while there are just a few changes all confined to a few editing tools in the develop module these changes are very powerful now i know we all find it frustrating when a program that we use a lot makes significant changes and we feel like we have to learn a new way of doing things but i encourage you to stay open-minded because once you get used to these new masking tools they're going to make your life a lot easier so let's take a look at the new tool panel right here at first glance it looks very different from the old panel but that's mostly because the old familiar tools have been rearranged and moved into little sub panels for example all the cropping tools are hidden under this icon right here and when you open it up you see it's just the same old cropping tools that we've been using all along likewise the healing tools are under this little band-aid icon when you click on that you see it's the cloning and healing brush that we're used to from the past and likewise under this little eye icon we have the red eye correction tools that we're used to all the real changes are under this new icon called the masking tools now we're already familiar with three of these tools which you can see right here the brush the linear gradient and the radial gradient we've been using those for years and they still work pretty much the same way now below those are a few advanced tools that have been brought up from deeper parts of the program color range selection luminance range selection and depth range selection which only applies to certain kinds of smartphone photos the two huge new additions are these two up at the top select subject and select sky those are entirely new tools that use artificial intelligence to select the subject of your photo or the sky in the photo and these are going to revolutionize the way you edit in lightroom now before we dig in let's talk for a moment about the word masks these are all described as masking tools now those of you familiar with photoshop may be used to this term but to many lightroom users it may seem new and intimidating but don't let it put you off because a mask is just a fancy word for a selected area of a photo you can call the selected part a mask and the tools that we've been using all along the brush and the linear gradient and the radial gradient those have always been creating masks even though that term wasn't used in lightroom before so don't let the word masks worry you you can just think of it as the part of the photo that you're selecting to work with all right let's look at some examples i'm going to show you the old way i would have done something in lightroom versus the new way that we can do with these new tools so here's a typical case where i might want to adjust the sky in a photo to make it more dramatic here's what i would have done in the past i take the linear gradient tool and i would draw a linear gradient on the sky so that i can make some adjustments to the sky now right away you'll see something new when i selected that tool this new masks panel popped up here now this little panel can be moved around if you don't like it where it is it can even be docked over in the main panel over here but i'm going to pull it back out just because i think it's a little easier to look at it when it's separated now the first thing i'm going to do i'm going to change the name of this mask 1 which is the generic name it gave it i'm just going to double click on that and change it to sky so i could remember if i had a bunch of these in one photo i could remember what this this mask is doing and you can see over here that it's showing in red that it's selecting the sky it's showing it because this show overlay is checked if i uncheck that you don't see the red if i check it there it is you can also do that with the letter o on your keyboard o for overlay i can toggle it off like that i can also bring it back by hovering my mouse over the thumbnail if i click on this mask layer it opens up what's called the sub layer which shows you what's inside that mask there's a linear gradient if i hover over that you can see the overlay hover over that you can see the overlay or i can check the checkbox there or use the o key on the keyboard to toggle it on and off you can also see this color swatch shows what color is currently selected for the overlay if i had a photo that had red things in it and i didn't want it to be red i can change the color by clicking on that let's say i wanted to make it green you can see my overlay is green now i can control the opacity of it if i want it stronger or lighter and i'm going to switch it back to red now before i make some adjustments here if you've forgotten how you work with these gradients you can change the pitch of the gradient by moving these outer lines to control how thick the edge of the gradient is you can move the whole thing by dragging on the pen in the center and you can rotate it by clicking on the center line and dragging so i would adjust the gradient to capture as much of the sky as i could it gets a little bit into my subject unavoidably but that's a trade-off we used to have to make and once i selected the part of the sky that i wanted to work with i would go over and make some changes to make the sky more dramatic let's say i bring the exposure down and i push the clarity up to give it more contrast and maybe some dehaze and i do all that stuff to make the sky more dramatic and that looks pretty good but there's a problem while i adjusted the sky i also was adjusting my subject because you can see the gradient partly overlays the subject so what i could do with these new tools that we could never do in the past is i could take out part of the mask part of that gradient and this is how i would do it right here in the masks panel under the linear gradient there's a button that says subtract i'm going to click on the subtract and i'm going to say select subject let's see what happens boom so lightroom went in and figured out what it thought the subject of my photo was and it subtracted the overlay the mask on the sky from that and i can see what it does because right in here if i mouse over this new mask called subject you can see what it decided was the subject of my photo and that made a pretty amazing choice that is exactly the subject of my photo and it figured that out all on its own i can still see what the sky mask is up there and now it no longer affects the subject so this is the power of the new select subject feature in lightroom and we're going to look at more ways to use this in a moment but first i want to go back and take an even simpler approach to this photo so i'm just going to delete everything i've done i'm going to delete all masks right here boom back to square one now let's look at a simpler way where i don't have to do a two-step process i could have just come in and used the new tool called select sky boom so you can see it just shows the sky perfectly like that now i could just go in and make my adjustments to the sky without having to do any fiddling around i'll do my adjustment to the exposure and the clarity and the dehaze and there i made my dramatic sky without even having to bother excluding my subject because lightroom just automatically knew what the sky was so now i will never have to use a linear gradient to adjust a sky in lightroom ever again let's look at another example now say i have a photo like this where i like the way the subject looks but i want to make some changes to the background how could i do that well i'm going to go in and i'm going to use the new select subject mask i'm just going to click on that wait for lightroom to do its thing and you can see it does an amazing job i'm just going to zoom in a little bit so you can see even a detail like this where there's a little gap in her hair and the background is showing through this little fly away hair up here that it mask so it's just astonishing how good it is at figuring out what the subject of a photo is now in this case though the problem is i want to make changes to the background but what i have selected is my subject so in a case like this you can do what's called inverting now there are a couple ways you can do this there's a little checkbox here which says invert and when i check it now you can see everything except my subject is selected and there's another place where you can get to the invert command up here in the masks panel and that is right here on the little sub layer menu it also has the invert command now don't be confused by the fact that it's not on the parent level of the mask menu that was confusing me for a while i was looking for it and where is it you have to go to the sub layer of the mask menu and you can find invert so now by inverting i selected the whole background and my subject is omitted from the changes that i'm going to make and i'll just make some changes now let's say i wanted to make the highlights brighter on those lights in the background to make them pop more and i'll bring the clarity down to make them even blurrier than they were so i just fuzzed out that background bokeh a little more now if i want to look at the before and after there's a little toggle up here at the top of the masks panel you can toggle it off that's your before back on there's your after off on and now here's one of the really cool things too about these new ai tools now let's say i had a whole series of photos which i do you can see down here in my film strip whole series of photos of the same subject this is very common you know you shoot shoot some event or something and you've got a hundred photos of the same subject with the same background and you want to apply the same kind of edits to them like you know you made the sky intense on one you wish you could replicate it across a hundred of them well you can do that now with these new tools even though the subject is not in the same position you know the subject changes position from photo to photo which you would think would make it very hard to replicate that across them but we can actually sync these photos and lightroom is smart enough to replicate that change across the whole set so we're going to try syncing this across this whole set of photos so first the first one is selected that i made the changes to and then i'll shift click on the last one this is the typical way we do a sync the the one that's most selected the one that's first selected will be the the master and the others will be the target so i'm going to click on the sync button down here and you can see there's a new thing in here which is a masking that was never in here before because we didn't have masking before and i've got everything else turned off because all i want to do is sync this change that i made with the masks to the background and now i'm going to say synchronize are you sure you want to continue i'm going to replace any other ones so now the first one is still the one that's selected let me go and see if it worked by clicking on the second one now here's the tricky little part when you do the sync it doesn't automatically update them until you sort of manually say okay update it so i selected the second one you can see the mask icon has a little exclamation mark on it there and also this uh the sub layer where it says subject has an exclamation mark and what that means is it's waiting for you to do something and what it's waiting for you to do is to look over here in this panel where it says the subject needs to be recomputed because this subject is in a different position from the subject on the one that it's trying to copy the mask from so it has to calculate to get it to do that you click on the little button that says update and you can see it come in in the background where it brightened and blurred out those those lights some more i'll do it on the third one so you can see it again so here's the third one as you can see it's got the exclamation mark like something is wrong it wants me to click update and there it did it so you would have to do that to each of these manually i'm not sure whether in the future they might streamline this so that you don't have to do the little manual update but it's still incredible to me even having to do this extra step it's figuring out by doing the ai trick where is the subject in this photo and it's applying the mask in a different place from the mask in the original photo that it's using is the master it's really incredible imagine how much time this could save you on like wedding photos or something like that and by the way the new select subject tool also works on group photos as well check this out boom the ai is pretty smart all right let's look at another example now in this case let's say i want to make some changes to the subject of this photo so i'm going to use my select subject and see what it comes up with it did a brilliant job as usual but let's say just for this example i want the statue of the buddha but i don't want the lotus flower or whatever this thing is that he's sitting on to be my subject so what do you do if the ai selects something that's not quite right or not quite what you want here's one thing you can do in that case now that it's selected i can come over to the masks panel and i can use the subtract command that we've seen before but this time i'm going to choose the brush and so i'm going to manually tell it what to subtract from the subject so now i've got my brush tool i'm going to use my right bracket key to make it a little bigger you can control these usual commands the feather the flow the density and i'm just going to start painting to tell it what to deselect and you can see it's taking the overlay away so i can tell what i've deselected from the subject and i'm going to make it a well i'll do some more of it with it a little on the large size and then i'll make it smaller to do the edge and let's say i make a mistake and i go a little too far up into the buddha there well i can reverse the tool so that instead of subtracting it's adding back by going right now it's the brush a i'm going to switch to erase and so now i can go in and undo where i made that little mistake and now i'll just switch back to brush a after i did my erasing so now i'm subtracting again and i'll make it a little smaller kind of do the edge i'm not going to do this perfectly because i don't want you to have to wait all day but you get the idea so now i've subtracted that from my mask and you can see if i mouse over my subject is what the ai decided it was and then here's what i did with the brush so now when i make my changes it's only going to affect the part shown by the overlay here so you know let's say i want to make this this stone statue have more texture and more clarity which gives it contrast just make it look grittier and stonier and now that i've made these changes in my subject let's say i want to make some changes to the sky well i can come up to the top of the masks panel and click on create a new mask and in this case i'm going to select the sky and once again the ai basically did a perfect job of that and then i could make the changes that i would want to make to the sky i'll darken a little i'll bring up the clarity to make it more contrasty and i'll de-de-haze it i'll make it very dramatic looking and then if i want to see the total of what i've done i can use the toggle up here turn all the masks off there's before there's after now we're going to talk about a more advanced way to use masks by intersecting two masks now intersecting sounds complicated but you can think of it in a simple way like an old venn diagram let's say you have two masks affecting two different parts of your photo and we saw this already i might have one mask affecting my subject and another one affecting the sky well let's say we've got two masks a and b each one of which is affecting a different part of my photo now the intersection of those two masks is just the area where they overlap if they both overlap on some part of the photo that's the intersection that's all there is to it so we're going to use this photo to demonstrate what intersecting masks means now one thing i discovered when i opened up this old photo from 10 years ago i opened up the masking panel and it's wait what there's a mask already on here i wasn't creating masks 10 years ago was i and but of course i was actually and if i click on that you can see what it is there's a linear gradient on this photo so in the new lightroom version 11 it's converted that into a mask and it shows up in the masks panel here and you'll find this on any old photos where you use the brush we use the linear gradient we use the radial gradient those adjustments will all show up as masks in the new masks panel now in this case i want to start fresh so i'm just going to delete this old linear gradient i'll just delete all masks so i'm starting with a clean slate you can see why i had added that i thought i was lighting her in this photo and i thought my light was a little too hot on her arm and her body down here so i had toned it down with a linear gradient adjusting the exposure down but in the old days the crude tool of the linear gradient was not only affecting my model like i wanted it to it was also dimming the background well let's say i only wanted it to affect my model well we can do that now by intersecting two masks so let's see how i would make this adjustment today so the first thing i would do is select my subject so that my changes only affect the subject and not the background so let's see what lightroom comes up with look at this is amazing let me go in on the hair here look at the masking on this hair imagine how many hours that would have taken you in photoshop in the old days when you had to mask that manually so this just it blows my mind every time i use this feature so we've got the subject selected now i want to apply my linear gradient in a way that only affects the subject and not the background so to do that i go to the little three dots here on this mask and i pick intersect mask intersect mask with what this time i'm going to intersect it with a linear gradient so now i'm going to draw that linear gradient from the bottom like i did back in the old days when i edited this photo the first time and you can see where it's affecting her by the red overlay on her skin now my linear gradient is only affecting her you can see it's not affecting the background because the subject was already selected and i'm intersecting this linear gradient with the subject and now if i bring that exposure down to cool down that overdone lighting you can see i adjusted her without adjusting the background and that's incredible that's something we couldn't have done in the old lightroom but now it's easy with these new masking tools now let's say i want to go a step further i want to make another adjustment to this photo i want to change the color of her outfit so how would i go about this well i'm going to create a second mask one just to select her clothing and since the clothing is part of the subject the first thing i'm going to do is select the subject so i'm going to create a new mask up here and i'm going to do select subject so now we've got two masks in the photo and to keep it from getting confusing i'm going to change the names of mask number one i'm going to double click on i'm going to call that lighting mask number two double click on the name call it clothing so we can keep straight what's going on with what so i've got the subject selected on the second mask now how can i isolate just her clothing well in the old days we could have painted every little bit of it by hand but that's a very difficult way we can do something better now i can intersect this mask of the subject with a color range mask to pick out her clothing by its color so here's how we do it on the clothing mask i go little three dots intersect with color range and i'm going to identify the clothing by color now you can see my cursor became a little eyedropper allowing me to pick a color so i'm going to just pick on the green of her shirt here you can see it looks like it got most of it but it missed these sort of bluer parts so i'm going to hold shift while i click on that little bit to add that to the color range and you can see it picked up more of it now it's a little hard to tell because of the color of the overlay what we're getting so i'm going to intensify the opacity so i can really see what we're getting and it looks like it might be missing some of these little some little details in the shadow areas so what i'm going to try doing is expanding the color range a little bit with this slider right here i can push it up and you can see as i push it up it gets more of those shadow areas but it also looks like it starts getting some of her skin and her face so there's only so far we can go there so let me see i'll push it up a little bit until where i think i can't go any further and then to really see what i'm getting there's a cool different way you can look at the overlay so i'm going to come into this little three dots beside the color swatch right now it's set to color overlay sometimes it helps to look at look at it as a black and white mask and you may be familiar with this if you use photoshop so you can see as a black and white mask it's very clear what's getting picked up still looks like i'm missing some in the shadow here and maybe some of the shadows there so i'm going to try pushing up the color range a little bit further you can see the further i go the more it picks up things that i don't want so i'm going to go about as far as i think i can i don't want these parts so what i can do now that i've got this selected i can subtract the parts that i don't want how do i do that well on this mask i've got the subtract button i can pick subtract i can pick brush i can just brush out what i don't want i'm not going to worry about the parts down down here because this is sort of the reflection of her clothing on her skin and it's very faint so i'm not going to worry about that because it doesn't doesn't matter if we change that slightly okay so now i'm going to flip back to the color overlay again it looks like we've definitely got the clothing selected there so now that i've got that picked out i can come in and just change the color i'm using the hue adjustment i'm going to take it from green make it blue so i can toggle the max off and on that's before that's after and that's all of them but you can see these are separate layers so i can look at them independently here's the clothing layer that's before that's after and the lighting layer before and after so i think you can see how incredibly powerful these new masking tools are we've only scratched the surface of what can be done with them this is a big update that takes lightroom much further into photoshop territory and by the way if you don't yet have my full course lightroom made easy you can get it from the link below this video this is a complete course containing 35 videos more than seven hours of instruction and it takes you all the way through from the basics of lightroom to the most advanced topics it's the only lightroom course you'll need and it's my most popular training course by far alright that's it i hope you found this video helpful and i hope you have as much fun as i'm having playing with these new tools [Music]

Channel: steeletraining

Views: 586

Keywords: Lightroom, 11, update, masking, selection, radial, linear, gradient, filter, brush

Id: U76OzE3mUps

Length: 24min 39sec (1479 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 17 2021