Lightroom Masking... Biggest Change EVER! (What's New in Lightroom Oct 2021)

this is going to blow your mind i can take this photo of a woman inside of lightroom classic and this is as of the october 2021 update i can use the new select subject feature to select her and convert her to black and white i can then use another selection layer i can make that select subject but i can invert it to use the exact opposite so now i can control the background and i can subtract from the background with say the graduated filter and turn half of the background to black i can then duplicate that selection layer invert the whole thing and now i can turn the other half of it to white and i do this with no photoshop no selections no brushing go from this to this all inside of lightroom classic well hey there my name is matt kloskowski and if you haven't figured it out yet i am blown away by the new masking and selection features that we have inside of lightroom classic and i will go on record as saying i think this is the biggest change i've seen come to lightroom in the 15 years i've been using it since the beta first came out so it is that big and so i want to spend a lot of time on it in this video i do have a shorter video i'll put the link in the description just a very very quick overview of the new features all of the new features in this version but this video is much more of a deep dive and just the masking and selection stuff this is going to work in lightroom classic it also works in your creative cloud lightroom cloud version i think it's version 5 and adobe camera raw you'll want to go to your creative cloud updater app to get those sometimes you got to restart the apps sometimes you might even have to restart the computer because they do roll these changes out over time adobe is always the place to go if you've got questions on how to get those updates because me or nobody else can help you out in the comments when it comes to that okay let's go ahead and dive in before you freak out all of your adjustments are still here if you did something in earlier version of lightroom all you have to do is now come to the new masking icon that's right above basic right below the histogram and that will reveal the new mask panel which has all of your adjustments so rather than having to hunt and peck on the photo where that's how we used to do it for the little gray dots you could see i've made on a previous version of lightroom i made two adjustments to this photo and now both of those are showing up separately here if you want to see the area that they adjust you can just hover over the little layer like icon box that you get over here and then if you wanted to see the actual adjustments and what was done to it all you have to do is click on it and it will show you the same panel that you've seen before so yeah it's i guess technically an extra click because you got to click on masking and then if you wanted to start something from scratch you create a new mask and you'll see your same tools are inside of there but the keyboard shortcuts from before still work so if you wanted to create a brush you don't even have to click on anything just press the letter k and it will take you right to this point where you can start brushing on to your photo so let's reset this and let's look at what would happen the first time we came into here on and working on a photo and essentially you're just going to click this little masking icon that's right above the basic panel and that's the first changes it's called masks where in previous versions of lightroom we used to just have this local corrections area that had our brush and our radial and our graduated filters in it now we go to this mask section but once you get past that once you get past the naming they're the same in fact you'll see the same three tools right in the middle here so those tools still exist here they still work the same i think more of this is just getting around some of the naming of things think of the word mask as selection or as a local adjustment whatever you want to call it they're they're all used interchangeably okay so when we click on masks we are now presented with a list of tools some of which are from the list that we used to have we're now presented with a list of tools to allow us to make a selection or a mask and all of these tools are it's just basically saying you are asking to what shape do you want that mask or selection to be it's not going to make a change to your photo doesn't make it change your photo at all at that point it's just asking you what shape do you want it to be and it's not until the step after that where you start wiggling around adjustments and sliders and everything that you will actually do something to the photo so let's go over this section we'll go over all three sections inside of it being you know the brush and gradients which are existing tools then we'll take a look at color luminance range i'm not going to talk about depth range here because it's not really meant for dslr photos and then we'll talk about some of the new ones which are the ai powered selection tools from photoshop where we can select subject and select sky let's kick off our first example and we'll go to our masking tool here and we'll choose the brush so i just want to do something simple i just want to maybe brush make these trees a little bit brighter so i can increase the exposure here maybe a little bit of the shadows and then just start to paint onto the trees like i always have not going to be perfect about it but as long as i use a large or soft edge brush i can actually get away with quite a bit and i'm deliberately gonna spill over a little bit because it's gonna let me show you a couple more features inside of here as a little side note public service announcement if you're somebody and i know so many people love their their brush and gradient presets if you look under the effect submenu here where you have all of your settings you'll see that's all of your presets inside of there and if you bought or purchased or made any of your own they'll be automatically ported over to the new lightroom and they do work so i've got one here in my landscape pack called sunshine that should look pretty good there so we can always tweak it a little bit and pull back on some of the exposure but that does a nice job of warming it adding some colors to it now we've always been able to hold down option or alt and go into subtract mode for the brush and i could subtract out any areas that i wanted to so that's that's nothing new we've been able to do that for a while but what is new is you'll notice up under our mask we have this little sub layer that shows us that we use the brush to create this under the brush we can see add or subtract so we've got two little buttons there well i'm going to click on the subtract button and now it shows me all of my selection tools because let's just call these what they are they're selection tools so it shows me all of my selection tools so yeah i could go grab the brush or the gradient or anything and i could subtract from the area that i painted but we can even go one step further and go to subtract select sky so we know select sky is going to select the sky well i can go in here and say we'll subtract that from my main selection or mask and watch look at that all right not sure if you saw it happen i'm going to undo that for a second i'm going to make this a lot brighter just so you can really see it happen here i'm going to go to subtract select sky and look at that gets rid of it from the sky i already got rid of it down below that takes care of it from the sky again i wouldn't want it that bright but it helped me demonstrate that example there now all of your masks will show up inside this mask panel probably a good idea if you start especially if you start creating a lot of them is to go double click the name of a mask and rename it so i'll just call this trees click ok every mask next to it has a little eyeball icon where you can turn it off turn it back on you can hover over it to see the area that you've painted on you can click on it to see the sub layers that show the selections that you created this mask with as you go down from there you'll see that there's a little overlay checkbox you can turn on and off the keyboard shortcut for that by the way is the letter o for overlay so you can turn that on or off or just hover and you'll see it you can change the color of the overlay and there's three little dots that will actually let you see it in a different way so if i turn the overlay on and then i can cycle through there's some different ones inside of here so if i just wanted to see a white on black mask you know much like we would see maybe in photoshop and if we were to look at a mask we can look at that view by the way i've had the question before no none of these masks will transfer over to photoshop in any way so unless you just open the photo in photoshop but the mask will already be baked in okay so let's go over here and turn that mask off and try out a different example that seems like a perfect time for a very quick word from our sponsor which is always me i promise it'll only be 60 seconds i just want to mention on the heels of this big announcement uh that i've put together a lightroom masking and brush deep dive okay it's two-fold it includes two hours of training and a whole bunch of presets so the training a little bit more encompassing a little bit better pace than what i'm covering here and i dive deep into everything because i want to get you ahead of this learning curve this is such a big change and i think it's important to get ahead of that learning curve because this canon will be the the bulk of the way that you edit your photos and then i'm including my brush and gradient presets which i've totally updated for the latest version of lightroom the old ones will still work but i've totally updated these because there's a couple of new settings that weren't available when i created those a few years ago that are available now so i brought those up to date with the latest version of lightroom put together all one affordable package and i hope that you will swing by and take a look at what's available let's go jump into our next example in this case i want to work directly or mostly with the sky i'm sure i can open up the shadows and maybe even overall exposure on the foreground here probably even warm things up a little bit it looks has a little bit of a cold feeling and then i'll go to my masks panel and i'll choose linear gradient and i'll just drag that down over the sky like so now you'll notice i drag that down before i ever made any adjustments over here so it's going to show you the overlay automatically which is a good thing because you want to see where you've actually applied your mask or your selection to and then you can come over here and make your adjustments and changes as i said just like with the brush any of your brush ingredients they're actually the same all of your brush presets are also gradient presets so i've got one in here landscape we'll go with landscape darker sky strong and you can see it'll go in and apply the settings that i had in the preset and of course you can always you know do them on your own you don't need to use a preset but i do suggest saving presets as you go along and you can always modify it too so i can just adjust these things when i'm done and then as i tried to do earlier we also have add and subtract so if i wanted to subtract from this adjustment i can click on subtract and i could say use the brush this time so before we subtracted a sky but in this case let's use the brush and i'll even lower my flow a little bit but since i'm using a pretty large soft edged brush i can go in here and i'll get away with being pretty haphazard about just painting along the edge there but i can get in there and erase that away and of course as we go deeper into this whole masking panel you're going to see we would never would have had to go this far because we have select sky now which would do it in a fraction of the time and a lot better than what we're doing but this also does showcase a really good concept of how we can do things that we used to be able to do and how you would do them today using the same tools the ability to do color and luminance range masks have been in lightroom classic we had to use them in in an adjustment so we would have to make a brush or a gradient mask first and then we could use them as part of it now we can make an adjustment based on color range or luminosity range which is essentially just you know brightness and darkness so here's what i mean i've got these areas in the foreground here especially the bright parts of the water and they're a little bit dull they're also very very blue because i opened up some of the shadows and that tends to introduce some very cold tones into the photo so what i can do is go over here and say all right i want to make a mask or selection based on luminance range first thing i'm going to be presented with is a little eyedropper icon of which now i can just go click on the luminance range that i want now lightroom is going to show you this again in red because i didn't make any adjustments to any of the the little smaller adjustments over here uh first so it has to show me what i'm i'm gonna do right it's got to show me where i'm gonna apply to which is a good thing and i actually use this i like this because before i make an adjustment i can refine this and you've got some refinement tools up here mostly the same function as what was there before in luminance range to me a little bit more usable you've got your middle little bar here which controls the amount of luminance range you want you know what tones do you want in this in this example i want fairly bright highlight tones maybe not the brightest because that would be up in the sky so i can pull back from some of those super bright areas you can see that starts to remove some of that red overlay and then the fall off is going to be used with the little adjustment sliders that are right below with those little triangle shape things that you see appear below your luminance range here okay so now i can go in here and i can adjust the fall off of it now i'll go down and i'll make some adjustments i can make it a little bit brighter maybe even boost the whites a little bit as much as making it brighter i also want to make it a little bit warmer as i'd said it it tends to take on a little bit of a blue tone when you open up your shadows and exposure especially some of those darker shadows so i can warm that up a little bit just to match the overall water if it does spill over if i hover over the range map you can see it does spill over to other parts of the photo that's again where you start to use your add in your subtract so i click on subtract i've got all these tools it's essentially saying to me what shape do you want to subtract with i want to subtract with a brush and i can go through here and paint out the brush this is also a good time i turn on the overlay that way i can visually see everything so i don't miss any spots but i can go through here and subtract all of those areas that i don't want that aren't the water because that's really the only spot that should get the adjustment moving on to the color range masking adjustment again we don't need an existing adjustment shape to to do anything we can make an adjustment solely based on color range so once i click on it same thing with luminance i would have to get the little eyedropper i have to select an area so i'll select this as a little piece of an orange peel and some shapes so i'll select that area and i want to make that probably maybe a little bit more orange than yellow this is also a great time just to see that you can experiment with your show overlay colors and click on that little swatch because you can change it to different colors that might be more visible other than red on top of an orangey yellowish type of a color here you can even control the opacity if you want to as well but what i'll do here is i'll go into my hue and shift that maybe a little toward orange just to the left and then there's a color adjustment down here it's not new it's been here forever i see you know just i notice a lot of times people miss it but i can always go down in here and even add a little bit more of that orange color to it if i need to this is also a great time i'll turn the overlay back on so now i can see parts of the photo that it's affected that i don't want so i'll click on subtract i'll use the brush and then i can go through here and just subtract and brush away any parts of the photo where i don't want that adjustment to effect and then just turn off the overlay once i'm done with it finally select subject and select background i'm going to demo this on a different photo than i started the tutorial with remember the woman on the simple background because every keyboard warrior out there whenever there's a tutorial with a simple background and any type of selection insists on you know running to their keyboards and typing that you know it wasn't a complex enough background so i'm going to change that i'll finish that tutorial at the end of this video but i'm going to change that i'm going to use a wildlife photo with a wild background it really it doesn't get any more complex than that this is a howler monkey in the costa rican rainforest and after doing some basic global changes i'm not able to get the foreground the subject and the background to where i want so that's a perfect time for a masking tool in this case i'll go to select subject and you'll see lightroom does a great job of making that selection and now i'll just go in here and increase that exposure a little bit open up those shadows a little bit maybe a little bit of texture even some clarity will help give it a little bit of contrast as well okay now this could honestly be just as big as select subject and select sky and it's one little word called invert because now that we have a selection of our subject we automatically have a selection of everything else there's a couple ways you could do this i could go to the the three little dots next to my mask layer and i could click duplicate make a copy of it and then invert it or it's basically the same amount of clicks to me create a new one do select subject let it select its subject just as a public service announcement invert is always a feature in the sub layer of a mask all right so if you go to your mask that top level layer and click on the three dots you'll never find invert inside of there it's always on the sub layer of that mask and that one took me a little while to figure out that's why i'm calling it out so i go to select subject and i choose invert now i've got a selection around everything else but the monkey and at this point i can reduce the exposure a little bit definitely reduce the highlights to pull back some of those bright spots i don't even know that i needed to do exposure as much as i did highlights and then i could even increase saturation if i want to boost the greens a little bit i wanted to you know change a little bit of the color i can mess around with the hue if i wanted to soften it up a little bit i could do a little bit of negative clarity which just tends to give a little bit of a glow a little bit of a softening look to it so you still have all of your same adjustments available for you now let's go there's a little toggle switch at the top of the masks panel lets you toggle everything off and then back on so off before back on i mean just when you not only is select subject amazing but the ability to have the invert totally i think takes it to a whole new level revisiting an older example where i selected the sky a different way let's do it using the new way so i've already got a mask here for the foreground where we did some luminance changes i'm going to go to click on create new mask and we'll choose select sky give it a couple seconds bam done i can go through my adjustments here i'm just going to use one of my presets under landscape and use the darker sky and then just maybe pull back a little bit on it here just like with select subject we can get the invert verse of it and we can do something to the foreground so i'll go over here and i'll create a new mask select sky again don't forget you click on this little mask layer here you can never invert the top mask layer it's always the sub layers inside of it so if i click on that and choose invert now i get the whole foreground now i can increase the exposure increase the shadows a little bit maybe make it a little bit warmer just tends to get very cold when i do that maybe even add a little bit of clarity and even a little bit of texture here to finish it off so i've got everything i've got literally what would have taken me god knows how long to do if i had to use a brush to painstakingly select all these areas um really honestly in just a few seconds you're able to not only make grade selections but also invert them to use the opposite areas which is usually exactly what we want for a landscape photo and as promised i said i would do a more in-depth version of this that i did in the beginning and i'd go through all the settings even if you're not into this genre of photography it's still fun to see how you can try to out think these tools and and just do something in lightroom that honestly you probably didn't think you could do so let's go to our masks panel i'm going to choose delete all masks that take gets rid of everything i'm going to do select subject and we will bring the saturation down to convert her to black and white and i'll even bring the contrast up a little bit here from here i'm going to create a new mask i'll do another select subject and this time i want to invert it because i want the background remember you can't ever do it on the top layer you got to do it on the sub layer so i can choose invert and then bring my exposure down i'll bring the blacks down that's going to give me a perfectly black background now i only want the left side to be black i want the right side to be white so i need to subtract the right side from this so i choose subtract i'm going to use a linear gradient so i'll use linear gradient and i'll hold the shift key down so it's straight up and down and drag from left to right it doesn't really matter because as long as it's behind her you're never going to see the seam inside of there this is one of those times where i will duplicate because i've already done some work on this layer so i'll click on that and i'll choose duplicate and then i want to go to my linear gradient and i want to invert it so i'm going to go to that linear gradient and choose invert and you see what happens it it made it black because i inverted it which essentially took the left side and flipped it over to the right side the left side still looks black why well these are layers guys so you're seeing the black layer that was below that if i hide that layer then you would see the original background so it works just like layers would work all right so it actually did do what it's supposed to do you just don't see it but now all i have to do is take my exposure and crank it up and move that all the way to the other side so now i get the white background i did it with essentially no manual work no brushing no nothing three simple selections and using the invert feature allows me to go from something like this all the way to this i've also gotten some questions from people if you can still do portrait retouching uh inside of lightroom and if you're some people have brushes and presets yes all of that stuff moves over perfectly and speaking of presets how's that for a segway i'd invite you to check out my lightroom masking and brush d-pad because it includes everything i hope you're there for the training because if you're a beginner maybe this was a little fast for you it will walk you through everything if you're more advanced it will dive deep into all of those little settings add subtract intersect invert basically getting lightroom to make these selections for you so that you're not painstakingly getting in there and brushing everything and i really think i've put together a very affordable uh package for you to not only get some really cool presets but to get some really great training to essentially master what i think is one of the biggest additions to lightroom one of the biggest changes that we pass and to really get yourself above that learning curve and really start taking advantage of it

Channel: Matt Kloskowski

Views: 173,524

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Id: ztuhNo7ZgdA

Length: 23min 55sec (1435 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 26 2021