Lightroom: Every Type of Mask = Perfect Control

hey guys thanks for stopping by i hope you're doing well i am back in lightroom today i'm just really honestly i'm seriously digging these new masking capabilities it's very powerful it's caused me to go back and look at lightroom and i'm taking a new look at photos and all that kind of stuff so i thought i would dive into using some of those masks on a photo and kind of how i'm using them and stacking them and taking advantage of all this amazing power that lightroom now has so here's my base a photo and i've done a couple things and developed to get it to there so basically original photo slightly darker new photo slightly brighter based on a few changes there in the basic panel but of course i want to get into the masking and so in this video i'm going to use a sky mask and then i'm going to use a sky mask that i invert to use on the ground then i'm going to use a color range mask then i'm gonna use a linear gradient and then i'm gonna top it off with a luminance range mask lots of fun it's gonna be awesome so appreciate you hanging out there it is there's my sky mask it's done it's in place and i'm gonna go bluer if you've been here before you know i kind of like blue in my skies it's just kind of my thing i just kind of like that that that temperature in my skies so making some minor changes here and a little bit of contrast and then i'm going to add a little bit of clarity as well i've gotten to where i like kind of adding clarity into my cloudy skies it doesn't really create a lot of noise or too much crunch but it gives a little bit of character which i like so if i were to turn off this mask there it is before and there it is now it's probably a little bit too blue i might pull it back a little bit even though i like my blue i don't want to overdo it but there's a number of things i still want to do so i could go in here and click on this and say duplic duplicate mask and then invert it but i i tend not to do that simply because when you duplicate it it will also take over all the edits and so for me it's just as easy just to say select sky and then when it does that go in here and just click invert and there we go i don't have to reset any of the uh any a little any of the sliders so now that i've got the ground uh selected and the cross i'm gonna go ahead and bump up that exposure i'm gonna go about there i'm gonna get a little bit more contrast as well something about like that and i'm gonna also add some clarity things like ground uh you know the ground and the rock and all that clarity just really works for me in those uh situations so there it is if i turn off mask number two there it is before and there it is now so brighter a little bit crunchier that sort of thing i'm liking what i have so far but there's a few things i want to do and this is where i get into kind of some of the customization if you will and i'm going to start by using a color range mask and so this one gives you an eyedropper you can go in and pick a color in which case i'm going to pick the color of the cross because that's the color that i mostly want to adjust here and some of that is showing up in this guy so i'm going to go ahead and hit subtract with a brush and i'm going to make it much larger so that i can cover a lot of ground really quickly and all i want to do is just erase any of that mask from the sky area it's pretty faint now you can change the uh the background and all that kind of stuff i'm just not getting into all that right now but i did want to pull it out of the sky and now that i've got that in place one of the things i want to do is warm it up a little bit so i'm going to go like low 20s here just to give it a little bit more of that warmth remember that's impacting the sky excuse me the cross but also part of the ground not a whole lot of the ground because it is a luminance mask so if i show you you can see all the red areas are the ones that are getting a little bit of warmth so what it's not is some of the areas that are already pretty warm which is kind of um uh you know kind of how it worked out there so which is good so i've got the temperature increased a little bit i'm also going to increase the exposure some maybe about like that and i'm going to give it a little bit of texture and a little bit of clarity so maybe a 10 on texture or so and maybe about a 15 or so on clarity now if i go back up here and turn this off you can see the before and the after so now i've got the cross looking a whole lot better a lot warmer it kind of goes with the foreground and that sort of thing i kind of like that or i do like it but a few more things i want to do to this photo i'm going to get a linear gradient and this is going to be for the foreground basically so something about like that and in this case i'm going to add a slight bit more exposure but i'm going to add a fair amount of contrast and so i like that contrast it really accentuates a little bit of the darker areas it's creating contrast the difference between dark and bright and so it's creating a little bit more darkness there which i like which i think plays up some of the lightness in some of the other areas and maybe not that much of a bump maybe about like that on the exposure but this linear gradient allowed me to just adjust slightly the foreground so there it is before and there it is after a little bit more contrast that was mainly the goal with that filter now that i've got that in place i'm going to go ahead and get a luminance range mask and in this case you can use this eye dropper to pick a an area that you want to adjust the tones in and i'm going to go ahead and click that one which as you can see it grabs basically similar areas to what i had in the last one but i can come in here and adjust this if i need to so i can pull this left or right it just depends on what you want to do you can come in here and customize to basically cover more or less ground and you're just basically shifting how this uh tonal range is being affected by the mass so i think i'm gonna go something about like this yeah it's always an experiment honestly so i think something like that looks good and what i'm gonna do here is actually pull the temperature down a little bit i'm trying to create a little bit more coolness in some of those green areas so if you go back and look at the mask you can see it the green areas aren't totally covered some of the other darker areas are but i think the cooler tim kind of works there so a little bit of a play of the warm tones and the cool tones kind of bouncing them um off against each other so to speak maybe a slight bit of increase in exposure and then some clarity as well so maybe like a 15 or 20 maybe something about like that now the thing is because the tonal range it also picked up this cross i want to go in there and hit subtract and i want to get a brush i don't want to apply all those adjustments to the cross frankly because i like the cross being a little bit warmer so i'm going to go ahead and erase that which is the best part of this is you can just come in and hit subtract i'm doing a little bit of a sloppy job here but i think you get the point what i'm trying to do is basically isolate the ground without the cross but with not the full effect of the ground because the difference is down here this mask if i do this overlay which is white on black and then show overlay that's what it is when i just use the ground mask but when i use this other one you can see that it's a bit more selective and so going in and adjusting the tones as i did here with the sliders in the luminance range impacts how much is white and how much is black and remember white reveals and black conceals so it gives me a little bit more control and i might come in here and just a little bit more but i mostly just wanted to show off how you can use that tool it's really powerful and i'm going to go ahead and change this back to color overlay and one more time you can kind of see where that's being impacted and if i hit done and close the masking tool you can see that i've made a lot of power uh powerful moves on this photo if you look at the before i mean it's vastly different and that's the current state and the last thing i really want to do is get a vignette and i ended up going with like a negative 30 something and then like you know keeping the mid midpoint around there and the roundness and the feathering i went to 100 but i kind of liked it not highlight priority but i kind of like the paint overlay it's not a massive difference but it seemed a little bit more gentle so if you look at paint overlay and then you look at highlight priority you can see the vignette when i'm there in highlight priority but here in paint overlay it's less of a vignette it seems a little bit tamer to me so if you look at the before and after there it is before and there it is after and i actually might pull that back a little bit because i definitely want it to be subtle so one more time before and after i think that does it for me and if you look at the entire before and after that's the photo before and that's the current state so with these individual masks is able to isolate the sky do things there isolate the foreground with the cross do things there isolate the foreground later without the cross do things there add a loom with the luminance mask and then also use a gradient on the foreground all these different things is added up and some of this is like trial and error and sometimes i go and i do an edit that sometimes counteracts a little bit of a previous portion of the edit and that's not by design there's no science behind that it's gym editing by feel which is really what it comes down to for me i do something and then i might go back and reverse it slightly later with a different tool that's just kind of how i edit it's a very fluid process but i'm i'm honestly i'm super impressed with these lightroom masks there it is before and last time there it is after lots of power lots of control and you can target such um specific areas now that it's it's it's really just super helpful so again congrats adobe great job i'm really excited about this uh if you want to see more lightroom videos i was thinking about doing some more workflow videos how i use other products with lightroom and how they work together as well as some uh you know continued lightroom editing let me know down below and other than that thanks for watching my friends hope you're doing well stay safe out there take care of yourselves i'll see you soon and adios

Channel: Jim Nix

Views: 1,500

Keywords: Jim Nix, travel, photography, post processing, editing, training, tutorial, photo editor, photo editing, Lightroom, masking

Id: MwGbdJhMFsA

Length: 9min 30sec (570 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 10 2021