Lightroom Classic & CC 2021 - NEW Masking Interface - Radial & Graduated Filters & Selective Color

hello and welcome to uh the second of two videos about the new masking features in adobe lightroom classic and cc for 2021 um i in the first video i covered the basics of the masking interface and how they're very similar in both programs classic ncc i'll leave a link to that video down below here and in this video what i want to cover are the masking tools which are the radial gradient the linear gradient tool and then also show you how to use the brush tool to create a selective color effect so let's get started with some photos and how these tools work and why we use them so we're going to hop over to lightroom and take a look at that what the selective editing tools in the masking panel in lightroom classic and cc let you do is uh shape attention basically that's mostly why i use them is you want to pull attention to different areas in the photo and there's different ways to do that different shapes and tools to help you be more effective and simple in doing that so in this photo of this portrait when i created the photo the background's a little too bright for for my preference now and what i really want to do is make uh paul his face here i want to make his face uh brighter than all the other stuff around it so what i really want to do is re-light this photo with lightroom and there's a very simple and easy way to do that inside of with the new masking tools and i'm going to show that to you now so to get started with this we're going to click on the masking tools and they're in the toolbar right below the histogram in lightroom cc they're going to be in a vertical uh panel uh and it's the same icon it's uh it's a circle with a dash line around it those are the masking tools and for this one the one i'm going to use is the radial gradient so it's going to be an oval or elliptical shape that where i can change exposure and light inside of that shape or outside of that shape so let's get started i'm going to click on the radial gradient it brings up the mask overlay interface and it says new mask and it's waiting for me to do something and what it's waiting for me to do is define where i want the mask to be so i just want to create a mask around paul's head so i'm going to the way this radial gradient works is you it's you click where you want it to start it is going to and then you draw and expand out from there it will expand out equally vertically and horizontally so the middle of most things on people's faces is their nose so click there hold and drag so my overlay color the blue you're seeing that's the overlay color that's not the way it's going to look but what you're seeing here as well is the inner ellipse is the the area that will be affected 100 percent and the outer area is the soft edge of that effect so i'm going to let go and now we will take a look at the how this tool works in the radial gradient the tool part the control part we have a feather which is the softness of that edge so i can make it softer up to 100 or harder at zero and as you might imagine if i did zero you're going to really see where the the effect is taking place so remember the way this interface works is wherever the mask is showing is what's being changed in this case what will be changed is paul's face which is not what i want actually what i want is paul's face is fine as far as exposure and color that i want it's everything else that i want to change in this photo here's how you do that so i have paul's face defined actually i want to go to a feather of about 20. they've changed how the feather works in this tool i used to say use a feather of about 50 on this but now i use about 20 20 to 25 depending on what i'm trying to do anyway back to my story apologies for the ramble i want to change where this will affect which is outside of paul's head so i'm going to click up here in the effects control part and change it to invert and now the mask is outside of paul and paul's head is not changed okay wherever you see the color in this case the blue will be changed so what change do i want to do remember i said i wanted to make that darker so i'm going to start with exposure and just darken that up i'm going to also do a little negative clarity there that'll just give a little blur and softness back there a little negative texture uh what else i want to do let me pull the blacks down in there just to darken it up a little bit so you can see i've got a little bit of extra brightness right here to the left of paul's face so i'm just going to adjust the mask just move it like all these tools the way you can move them is to click on the pin that's in the center so i can just click and move this i can even resize this if i want if it's too big i can make it smaller i can make it narrower i can rotate it if i want the way you rotate is just put the cursor outside the main circle and you just click and hold and change the rotation pretty easy so now i have my mask and uh my spotlight now basically i'm just paul's head and everything else is a little bit darker and that is what i want let's see what it looked like without it so too bright in the background and that's what it looks like now here it's easy to kind of over compensate with these so i think this is a little too dark in the background so i'm just going to brighten it back up oftentimes what i'll do when making these adjustments is go where i think it looks good and then back up from there either direction if i made it brighter make it a little less bright if i make it darker make it a little less dark yeah so that's a quick start with the radial filter to use an oval elliptical shape to change exposure in a photo we're going to move now to the gra graduated filter the linear gradient as it used to be called and uh here we go so in this photo i want to change the sky i want the sky to be have a little more drama to it i want the sky to have uh more impact in the photo and re if you watch the first video and if you haven't there's the link there for that there is a cool set of automatic selection tools in the new masking panel and one of them is select sky so we're going to start there with the mask panel open and i'm going to click select sky and it's going to do some thinking for just a moment and it's going to select my sky so it's showing with a blue overlay which because the sky is blue it's a little hard to make sure you've selected what you want so i'm going to change my mask color again by clicking on this little blue square in the mask panel and click on it and choose a different color and go back to that original red right there and now i can clearly see where uh the mask is happening the chain and the mask shows again what will be changed uh i i like to name my masks uh if i only have one i i don't but if i ever think i'm going to have more than one i name them so in this case i double clicked on the word mask and then i just clicked and i'm going to type the new name which is sky so with the sky selected what i want to do i want to bring more drama more interest to the sky so i'm going to i usually start on that stuff with with the the presence controls of texture clarity and dehaze turn up the texture turn up the clarity if you really want to see drama in your skies the d haze tool is your friend so uh that's a little much at least for me your mileage will vary so crank that up as much as you'd like and bring in the more drama to the sky now one thing that's true about skies is they tend to be different higher in the scene than they are where the horizon is so oftentimes what you'll do is you would have a gradual effect of this so it's stronger at the top and maybe uh the effect that you're doing in this case the sharpening and attention is less as it meets the horizon so we can do another cool thing with the masking panel is add a gradual change to this affecting only the sky it's probably easier if i show you how to do that so here's how you do that uh in the sky that we've named or that's actually the sky that was selected click on the three dots and then you're going to add intersect mask with a linear gradient a linear gradient so a linear gradient is is a line it goes from effect to no effect and so in this case what i'm going to do is draw a gradient starting from the top of the sky where i want it to have effect and then clicking and holding and defining the area where i want the change to not affect so i'm going to click and hold and i'm going to draw and click and hold and pull down it's a little hard to see with this going on so i'm just going to throw in some exposure change so you can see what i'm talking about i'm not going to leave it like this but i'm just using this to demonstrate so what happens is it's you can see the graduated area it the middle of these three lines is where the 50 percent is above that in this case because i started from the top will be gradually getting to a hundred percent at that top line and then below will gradually go to zero percent of that effect and you can see the mask is changing it's gradually going away so the cool thing about this is i can even drag this down here but you can see it's not affecting the bottom of the image because there's it's intersecting this linear gradient with that sky mask really cool this is new in in this version of lightroom and it saves so much time uh and it's it saves confusion and oh it's just such a good thing so i don't want that exposure change at least that drastica one so i'm just gonna drag that back to about zero and then i have my mask available to me i can change the the length of the duration i can make it shorter i can rotate it let's say you want the sky to look different on the left and the right i don't know why you would but you could go at an angle you could go straight and then you can move this where it affects and there you go it's really powerful one of the things our digital cameras have a hard time doing is is rendering uh bright which is off in the sky and dark which is often everything that's not the sky so you can help your photos quite a bit by doing this kind of treatment where you have when you have a lot of the skies showing in your photos so i'm just going to kind of fine tune this a little bit maybe a little bit less even still of exposure negative mostly what i did here in the sky was the the texture clarity and dehaze to just bring more drama into it obviously you have all these controls you can play with uh it's going to vary on your photos which ones look best so let's just do a quick before and after to show you what it looks like without this so i'm gonna hide the uh the edit with the mask and that's what the sky looked like in the original photo here's what it looks like now much more drama much more postcard much more like it felt when i was there all right next we're going to move to another portrait photo uh and we're going to do use both the the radial filter and the linear gradient to uh to edit this photo and again showing you how you can layer these have multiple of these to work together and do what you want so we're going to start with the face here um i want the face to be just a little bit brighter uh than everything else and i'm also then in the top left corner gonna darken that corner down a little bit uh to again bring more attention back to the face so the mask panel is already open i'm going to start with my radial gradient and i'm just going to click and draw the area i want to change so the area i want to change is her face is kate's face uh i want a little bit less feather there about 20. i don't know about you but when you talk to your computer do you kind of talk in a different voice like my lightroom voice is different than my regular voice anyway i've got her face covered and what i want to do like i mentioned is brighten it up just a little bit and i'm also going to brighten the shadows on faces here's a little portrait tip if you want to hide wrinkles not that kate has any but one way to hide the stuff we get as we get older is you brighten up the shadows another way to do that is to decrease contrast you have to be a little careful with both of those that you don't push and pull too much that it starts looking plastic or fake or very obvious um so that's basically all i wanted to do is just a little nudge here i just want to nudge a little extra brightness into her face and um that's what i need for that so the next thing i want to do oh i'm going to need i'm going to name my mask because you'll be glad you did so i'm going to click on um double click on the mask and call this face and i'm going to do a new mask create new mask up here on the plus button and this will be a linear gradient i'm going to start from the sky and pull in usually with these you have to play around and adjust a little bit here and there to taste what i want to do over there is darken that a little bit i'm going to use the shadow slider to darken that i'm going to take the highlights down as well as the whites you have to be you want this to look natural and sometimes just dragging exposure no good so gentle with the exposure and use the the rest of the tone controls highlight shadows whites and blacks to get you the look you want so there we go so uh this i want to name this mask i'm going to call this sky well we'll call it top left because that's what it is so without the top mat left mask and there's without her face it's just a pretty mild adjustment to her face but it makes a big difference so overall there you go we used a radial filter to brighten her face graduated linear filter linear gradient to darken that top left corner again to pull attention more to her face the subject of the photo all right one more for fun one more for fun here a real common effect is is what's called selective color where you make everything in the image black and white except for one element which remains in color and i'm going to show you how to do that using the uh the masking tools and then i want to show you how to use it as an editing tool as a attention shaping tool so we'll get started it's only about three steps if i remember correctly so here's step number one uh with the uh masking options open you're going to use a brush for your first step and then what you're going to do is make a huge brush huge brush huge brush make sure auto mask is turned off and you can go ahead at this point and take your saturation in the effects part and take it to -100 what we're going to paint with is black and white we're painting all the color out so i'm just going to click and paint on my image and there you go it's all black and white easy the next step is in uh bringing back the color where i want it to be which is just on the one uh orange leaf so i'm going to change to the erase tool over here i'm going to leave auto mask on and next i'm going to do is use a small eraser so using a small brush i made my brush smaller with the mouse wheel i'm just going to click and hold and paint back where i want the color to return in the image i do have auto mask turned on for this especially around the edges that'll help me be a little more precise i've been painting with a mouse long enough that even though i am left-handed when i write i can paint better with a mouse with my right hand than my left so there you go all right so go around the edges real quick ish and then once you've got the edges done what are you going to do you're going to turn off auto mask go to a larger brush and finish painting in the inside the reason i turn off auto mask when i paint uh on larger areas is that way the auto mask won't be detecting the uh like the contrast difference here along the spine of the leaf and then i have to paint over it twice all right so there you go that's selective color usually the brush mask so this is a special effect but you can use this special effect as a quick way to get you to where you want so that now i can just pull attention to this leaf and here's what i mean by that so instead of being minus 100 with the saturation so i still have the mask active so i put the mouse here it's still active so wherever it's red is going to be affected by what i do next so with the mask active i don't want it to be pure black and white but i want it to be less colorful there i want to pull attention to the leaf so the way i'm going to do that is to bring the saturation to right around -50 so i take a lot of the color out of the rocks the wet shiny rocks so that it increases contrast the next thing i'm going to do to increase contrast on those rocks is turn the exposure down a little bit don't do that that looks special effect again i want it to look like it could have looked like this and then i'm going to pull it down to about about minus 0.5 and what else do i want to do uh well maybe just darken that a little bit with the blacks as well we'll take the blacks to about minus eight or nine and there you go now there is one little thing that's still pulling attention because the only thing that's got color now is this the leaf plus this little there's a little red leaf up here too so what i'm going to do is do a new mask a brush i'm going to paint with -100 and just quickly that's too big smaller smaller brush i'm just going to do a quick hit on that right there this works i wasn't very precise you'll notice when i did that because there's the the metal of the train tracks right there that's also has no color so you'll learn when you can be lazy and sloppy and when you need to be precise so this what this does is instead of going to the full selective color what i've done is use selective color as a starting point to pull attention to that leaf so there's some information a quick look at how to use the the radial filter in the new masking interface how to use the linear filter in the new masking interface how do you select sky all the new features that are really powerful in the masking panel in lightroom classic in lightroom cc they give you lots of options for shaping attention for directing the story you want to tell with the photo through color and light and i hope you have a lot of fun experimenting with them using them in your photos to to tell the story you want to tell if you have questions you have comments please leave them in the comments below if you've enjoyed this video i would appreciate it very much if you'd hit the thumbs up button well don't hit it gently press it and that will train the youtube algorithm about videos that you find helpful and interesting and if you want to see more lightroom videos more photography videos please subscribe to this channel that would be a big help as well tell a friend or ten and let them know hey you gotta see this stuff or it's worth a laugh anyway or put you to sleep whatever is true for you so there you have it a quick introduction to the the radial gradient the linear gradient and how to use the brush tool to create a selective color effect that you modify to pull attention in your photos this new interface the masking tools in lightroom classic and cc is really powerful uh with the addition of the select sky and the select subject as well as the intersecting with the other options just gives you so many new tools and ways to be creative in telling the stories you want to tell with with light and color in your photos and shaping attention shaping feeling getting that look that you want without hopping over to photoshop that will take years to learn so i hope you found this helpful if you have any questions or comments please leave them in the notes below in the comments below i'd appreciate that let's have a conversation uh if you like this video please gently press that like button that'll train youtube algorithm about videos you find helpful and interesting and if you want to see more stuff about lightroom about photography about fujifilm cameras about tips and things i've learned along the way please subscribe to this channel please tell a friend or or ten let them know what you think and that's always a big help that's greatly appreciated hope you have fun using these new tools in your photos in lightroom uh use them to shape and uh tell the story you want to tell with your photos and i look forward to seeing you in the next video so until then stay safe stay well and bye for now [Music] you

Channel: Michael Sladek

Views: 4,901

Keywords: lightroom, lightroom classic, lightroom cc, lightroom 2021, lightroom 2022, lightroom mask interface, lightroom subject select, lightroom sky select, lightroom spot removal, lightroom healing brush, how to use spot removal, how to use healing brush, how to use brush tool, how to use new lightroom mask interface, how to use radial filter in lightroom classic, how to use radial filter in lightroom cc, how to use linear graduated filter in lightroom

Id: eX3p4C0Bd_E

Length: 24min 34sec (1474 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 26 2021