Lightroom Masking Tutorial: Your WORLD-FIRST Deep-Dive Look at this AWESOME New Feature

[Music] what's going on everybody i hope you're doing well it is once again that lovely time of year where the temperatures start dropping the leaves start changing at least for those of us in the northern hemisphere and adobe holds their annual conference adobe max in this case adobe max 2021 going along with this conference every single year is their unveiling of major updates to their creative cloud suite of apps and that of course includes the lightroom ecosystem as well now i'll be covering all the major updates coming to the lightroom platform in a separate video for this one however i'm focusing on one key update that is absolutely a game changer for the lightroom ecosystem and that is masking now i do need to warn you this is going to be a lengthy lengthy video i've got it broken into chapters so you can jump from section to section if you'd like however i gotta warn you so much is changing with this release that if you don't watch through all of this you may find yourself kind of lost maybe totally confused as you jump in and start trying to use this new masking functionality within lightroom so grab your beverage of choice sit back and relax and let's just jump right on into this all right before i start walking through every little new feature and tool with masking in lightroom first things first you gotta ask the high level question of what in the world is masking you're probably already familiar with local adjustments which are the graduated and radial filters as well as the brush adjustment tool each of those allowed you to focus edits on specific parts of the image additionally on top of those local adjustment tools you could apply either a color range mask or a luminance range mask to further refine the edit you're working on masking takes those local adjustments and that concept of working on specific parts of the image to a whole new absolutely awesome level with the introduction of several massive updates and enhancements and new features that have been waiting for a very long time now i'm gonna go through each of these things pretty deeply here in this video hence the longer length but for now let's do kind of a rapid fire step through of the new features that are coming to lightroom and one thing i really need to emphasize here is this is not just lightroom classic this is the entire lightroom ecosystem that are getting these updates with masking so whether it's the mobile app whether it's adobe camera raw which isn't really lightroom but basically it's what lightroom is built on top of the lightroom cloud centric desktop app or of course lightroom classic every single version has these new tools so i'm going to be showing you lightroom classic here for the sake of the examples but just know that it works basically the same across whichever version of lightroom you happen to be using or that you happen to prefer totally awesome long overdue huge win for all of us now masking is kind of built upon the old foundation of those local adjustments however it is far more robust and it's really been built new from the ground up so that adobe could implement a whole slew of new features and advanced functionality that wasn't possible with the old local adjustment functionality in the past versions of lightroom one of the biggest changes is how color and luminance range masks work whereas in the past you had to apply them on top of an existing local adjustment now they are completely independent and also far more flexible and powerful in terms of the ways you can refine and adjust them and with this new masking functionality within lightroom you're actually creating masking groups each of which can consist of either an individual or multiple adjustment types within the specific group in which you're working i'll dive into this later because it's a very different concept from what we're used to but you're going to see how it's absolutely awesome and one of my favorite aspects of this new masking functionality now it could be said that masking kind of straddles the gap between lightroom's traditional local adjustments and the layer functionality within photoshop but it is important to note that it's not exactly layers like i said it kind of straddles that line a little bit but it's not layers and it's not local adjustments it's truly something new and different and robust and awesome we'll keep going through that as we get further into the video one of the coolest and most powerful new additions is adobe's added in smart selections as part of this masking tool with the simple click of a button you can have a mask automatically created that just includes the sky of an image with another quick button press you can invert that so you're only selecting the landscape part of the image conversely if you're a portrait photographer click a button and it can automatically create a mask that is just your subject of the image be that a person or an object or what have you that's one example of some of the new powerful functionality that is included with masking that simply wasn't possible before with the old local adjustments platform the other great thing here is you can create combinations of masks i can create a mask based on a sky selection and intersect that with a mask based on color or combine it with a mask based on a brush or a radial adjustment you can combine and create and add and subtract and do all of these really complex things to get super refined super complex masks in a relatively quick and simple manner as i mentioned a moment ago the color and luminance range masking has been completely decoupled from the other types of adjustments so no more having to create a graduated filter off to the side of an image and then using that so you can do a luminance mask across the entire thing you can now create a luminance mask on its own you can create a color mask on its own without having to do anything else and as i also mentioned you can invert mask using intersect mask so you can now tell lightroom hey i want to adjust everything in this image i'm going to select blue but i'm going to invert that so really what you're telling the platform is i want to adjust everything in this image except the blue parts of the image you couldn't do that with the old local adjustment tools on top of that ability to invert a selection you can also intersect selections so take for example selecting a sky and creating a mask off of that but then saying you know what of that sky selection that complex sky selection i only want to worry about the darker portions of the sky right now maybe you want to cool down the shadows or the darker tones in the sky a couple simple clicks you can create an intersecting mask between that sky selection and a luminance selection where that overlaps that's the only area that you're going to be adjusting so you can easily adjust the darker tones the lighter tones the mid-tones and a very very complex mask now there's a lot more to this i'm going to walk through a lot more than what i just covered here but the last thing i want to call out here it seems like a relatively minor thing but probably the thing i'm most excited about probably the thing i'm as excited about as anything else is the ability to actually name your masks you have mask groups you have individual elements within each group you can name every single one of those so thinking back to an image you worked on six months ago a year ago two years ago you revisit that image today and you've probably got local adjustment pins all over the place and you don't remember what they were for you gotta click on each one to see what sliders you tweaked you gotta hover on it to see what portion of the image you adjusted with masking there's no more guesswork you can name each mask group so that no matter when you come back to an image you know exactly what you used it for you can see all the details and the mask overlay and you're good to go once again the long and short of all of this is this masking functionality is absolutely awesome as i said it brings to the table a lot of features that i've been asking for and hoping for for several years now i'm absolutely thrilled with it it is a lot to digest it's a little bit difficult to wrap your head around some of it initially that's why i wanted to do this deep dive video to help you understand that hopefully ease the transition from thinking about local adjustments to working in this new world of masking within the lightroom ecosystem i realized some of the things i just talked about probably made very little sense so let me just stop right here in terms of this high level overview and we're going to jump right in taking a deeper dive look at each one of these new features with masking so starting right off the bat coming into lightroom classic version 11 you'll notice where you normally would see the local adjustment options for the graduated filter radial filter and brush tool those are no longer listed here instead you have a new icon here specifically for masking and if you click on this it's going to open up your initial default masking toolbar window whatever you want to call it and you've got a few different options here for creating new masks now these first two select subject and select sky i'm going to walk through those in a moment so we're going to skip those for now but here's where you find your brush linear gradient and radial gradient options that you're familiar with as well as color range mask and luminance range masks so before we go into actually creating the mask just a few things to show here real quickly if i do choose to create a brush mask the first thing you're going to notice is you have your adjustment panel that you're used to whereas in the past on previous versions of lightroom your brush setting tools were down at the bottom of the adjustments you now have that at the top and then you come on down you still have your usual presets selection here that you're again going to be familiar with if you've used lightroom local adjustments in the past i'll go further into creating basic adjustments or basic masks here in a moment for now what i want to show you is how you can actually modify this new mask panel here in terms of display and things like that so first things first it's going to open your default panel if you already had some masks those would be listed within here and again i'll show that a little bit further into the video first thing you can do is you can collapse this down to get it out of the way a little bit if it's overlapping part of your image you're wanting to look at or work on just click these little arrows to pop it back out the other thing you can do is you can actually drag this anywhere on the screen so if i wanted to bring it over to the left bottom right on top of the image for some reason i can do that or i can just bring it back up to where it is by default and then the last thing you can do with this new mask management panel is you can actually pin it within the adjustment panel so if you drag it over you'll see that blue line up here if you let go of your mouse button now it's docked in here along with your adjustment panel so you've got different options in terms of your preferences on where this is i personally prefer to keep it just back in the original spot but just be aware that those are some quick simple things you can do in terms of deciding where you want the panel displayed and how you want it displayed okay the next thing you want to walk through here is creating some basic masks now some of this is still fairly similar to what you're used to with the old local adjustments functionality within lightroom but you'll start seeing where some of these bigger differences come in in terms of the the workflow or user experience side of things as well as how some of the tools actually work a little bit differently than what we're used to so let's just jump on in here to creating the basic mask so once again i'm going to come up i'm going to hit the new mask icon so if i come here and click on this brush option we're going to see some of the first big differences in terms of the user interface and how things are laid out so if i click on brush again we already talked about how your new mask panel opens up here in this little upper right corner spot so if i come out here and i click and i start brushing in just like we're used to i'm creating my brush adjustment nice and easy if i were to delete this out and say i wanted to add one of the linear gradient adjustments now because i've already opened up a mask i'm going to just click the add button and whereas before i selected brush now i'm just going to come out here and select linear gradient just like with what we're used to the direction you drag from is the direction where it's going to be painted from and then gradient out to where there is no adjustment so if i want to adjust the bottom portion of the image here i'm going to click from the bottom and drag up towards the top and you can see with this red overlay it fades out from a full adjustment at the bottom of the image and then gradually fading out to where there's no adjustment at the top now the other thing to note here if i delete this out and then come back up and let's add a new linear gradient just like on the prior versions of lightroom if you hold down the shift key before you click and drag it's going to keep that adjustment perfectly straight so whereas before when i was creating it i was kind of wobbling back and forth holding down that shift key is going to keep it perfectly parallel with whatever direction you're pulling from just the same as what we're used to with the older versions of lightroom and once again i'm going to right click delete linear gradient come back up to add and we'll do a radial gradient and same again as before you click and drag to create that adjustment if you wanted to resize the radial gradient you've just created if you just click on one of the grab pins here it's going to change the actual shape of it whereas if you hold down the shift key again just like we're used to it allows you to adjust the size of it without adjusting the shape and conversely just like the linear gradient tool if i delete that and come back up to add and go to radial gradient and if i wanted to create a perfectly circular radial adjustment i'm going to hold down the shift key then i'm going to click and drag and now i've got a perfect circle okay so let's talk about the next big change that comes with masking in the new versions of lightroom and that is around the color range masks and luminance range masks now if we come in here to the masking panel we've already got that selected so i have my different options down here and you can see not surprisingly you have options for color range luminance range as well as a depth range which doesn't apply here that's more for your cellular phones that have multiple cameras and can record the depth into the image file but anyways with the past implementation of color and luminance range masking and lightroom classic you could only use those options if you already had a brush radial or graduated filter adjustment already applied they were essentially coupled to an existing local adjustment so the big enhancement here is not only do you now have these range masks the color and luminance range mask available within all versions of lightroom not just classic but they've also been completely decoupled from having to have another adjustment already in place so if i come in here to the panel and i select the luminance range i can do that directly without having to apply anything else and now by default i've got my eyedropper icon here is my cursor so i can just click on a single point and you can see that now it has automatically selected everything in that brightest part of the image you can gauge that by where the red overlay is applied or i can draw the box option to grab a broader range of luminance from within the image you can see that tweaks it a little bit further if i come up here i could say let's go for maybe this kind of mid-tone that's in the clouds and you can see now those highlights are excluded from it and it's only pulling in the darker areas of the image itself into this new luminance mask so this is a huge improvement over the way you had to do it in the past it works the exact same way for your color masking as well too so let's go ahead and delete this out and we'll go to the add button and now we're going to select a color range so again it defaults to now i've got my eyedropper so let's just choose one of these warm tones on el capitan so now you can see by looking at the red overlay here that it's only selected the parts of the image that have that same color in them just like with the luminance masking i can also draw a box to select a broader range of colors you can see the mask gets much larger here because this there's some darker tones in the in the rock face there but you can still see us excluding the blue tones and things of that nature so again instead of having to create a brush or a radial or a gradient adjustment first i can come directly into my image choose to do either a color mask or a luminance mask and i'm good to go and then the last thing to show here with the color and luminance range mask is how you can refine them a little bit using some of the built-in sliders so if i come back over and open up the masking section and let's just start with color range now i've created a new mask i need to set the parameters so in this case let's just say i want to create a mask that's only going to focus on this range of blues within the image now if i hit the o key to turn on my mask overlay you can see that for the most part other than some areas where some of the color tones overlap with some blues in them it just masked out everything but that range of blues now what i can do is if i come over to the refine slider over on the right here by default it's at 50 as i slide to the right it's going to start blending things a little bit more so more of the image is going to be pulled into that mask conversely if i double click and reset this back to default as i pull it to the left it's going to refine it closer and closer to that specific color range that i selected if i go all the way to the left it's pulling in very closely to that window or that box that i drew now there are a couple other things to note with the color range mask so let me turn off this overlay real quickly so right now i've just selected that blue area remember i drew the box so it's a range of blues if i came up here and drew a box from red to green to blue it's actually going to do a blend of those colors combined so i'm not getting just the area that was enclosed in the box as far as color tones go i'm getting some other areas here as well however if i were to come in and select red and then hold shift and select green and then keep holding shift and select blue now as we go into our mask overlay you can see it is only pulling in those three specific colors so kind of an interesting side effect here again if you're using that box feature and clicking and dragging to select a range of colors it's essentially coming up with a final blend of the color that you're looking for whereas if you do shift and click you're going to get a much more defined mask selection on the individual colors that you click and same thing here you can use the slider if i double click this that's going to take it back to the default value pull it to the right there's going to be more blending pull it to the left it's going to be much closer to the exact colors that i picked now if i delete out this mask completely and let's come in here and try the same things with the luminance instead so instead of looking at specific colors and be looking at a specific luminosity within the image so i'm going to click to create my luminance mask so i've got that now again just like with the color i either click on a single point and now it's going to be looking for luminance in the image that is similar to that single point i chose now you can see this also is dependent upon the color as well so if i remove the mask overlay it's reading these greens and yellows and purples and blues as a brighter luminance within the image compared to the red and the blues now again just like with the color selection if i click and drag i can create a range of luminosity so now i'm pulling in those reds and blues that were excluded previously and now if i hit o to turn on the overlay now you can see we've got really what you would probably expect more is that the far right of these gradients are all selected because those are the brightest parts of the image now some things to note in terms of refining this mass so if you come over to the right you have your luminance range and you've got a few different things that you can adjust here this box here this kind of gray box that's got a slight gradient within it is indicating what luminance range i've selected you'll notice there's kind of little tabs on one end or the other if i grab one of those tabs and start pulling it i'm making that range narrower in this case if i pull it back to the right i'm making that range wider conversely if i go to the left side of it if i pull it to the left i'm bringing in more of the dark ranges while retaining the selection on the highlights and if i pull that back to the right then i'm going to be excluding more of those dark ranges and on top of that i can click and hold anywhere in this little box and i can drag the entire thing left and right so you can see what that's doing to the selection i've made now you'll notice it's not changing the size or the range of luminosity i'm just changing where within the luminance band the selection is made it's the same total range of luminosity but different parts moving it either from the highlights into the shadows or maybe the mid-tones simply by dragging this box back and forth so i'm going to drag this back to the right a little bit now you also notice there's two little tabs on the bottom part here as well now if i grab those let's say i'm grabbing this left one that's going to let me define how much of a drop off there is from the range i've selected into the other luminance within the image so let me just show for an example so if i grab this and pull it to the left you can see it is bringing in a softer transition into the other luminance of the image in this case into the shadowed areas of the image if i pull it all the way over it's going to basically fade from the selected range all the way into my deepest shadows if i pull this back to the right i'm going to exclude more of those shadows because that drop off is getting narrower same concept for the highlights if i pull that one to the right i'm increasing the amount of drop off or blending from the range i selected into the rest of the highlights so you can see how you can refine this very easily and pretty specifically as well to help you hone in on the exact range of luminance you want to select for your edit and the last thing you can do obviously i've got the overlay turned on right now if i hit the o key to turn that off there is this option for show luminance map as well if i tick that it's giving me that red overlay by default to show me which parts of the image are impacted by the selection i made so by using this combination of sliders whether it's the feathering on the color selection or the drop off and zone range essentially for the luminance selection and you can see how all that plays together to really help you refine those masks to get them honed in on exactly where you want to be okay moving right along here the next piece to talk about is some enhancements they've made to the actual mask overlay itself so right now i've got the overlay turned off for this luminance range mask if i want to turn it on i've either got the show overlay tick box down here at the bottom of the mask panel itself before it would have been down in the lower left-hand corner so they've moved that the o shortcut still works if you just hit the o key that will turn on the mask overlay hit it again to turn it off now on this particular image i've got the default red overlay selected and let's say i find that that's a little bit hard to really gauge where my mask is actually being applied if i click on the red color box here now instead of just having a few predefined color options to choose from you can actually change the mask to any color of the rainbow that you would want you can also choose whether you want it to be brighter or a darker tone of the color that you've chosen so that's a nice little enhancement they've added in here you can also adjust the opacity of the overlays if i want to make it 100 opacity or drop that opacity down so that i can see the image quote unquote behind the overlay you can do that as well the other thing you can do is come down to overlay shows and by default it's selected for affected area but if you click on that you can reverse it essentially or invert it so now if i choose unaffected area it essentially inverted the overlay mask so now the area that's selected for this particular mask is actually shown without any type of overlay at all i personally prefer to have affected areas so i'm going to switch that back now before we close out of this there's also another little option menu up here for overlay mode so if we click into that now you've got multiple options here as well so i can do color overlay on a black and white version of the image so if i do that it converts the entire image to black and white but leaves that red overlay we do image on black and white image on black image on white or white on black which is very similar to how you would see masks within photoshop and the general rule of thumb to remember here is that white reveals and black conceals i've actually been using this white on black option because that's telling me that the areas that are white are going to be impacted and the areas that are black or those gray or mid-tones or you're going to be less impacted if it's a gray tone or if it's black it's not going to be impacted by my adjustments at all so that's the overlay i prefer to use if i close this out you'll also notice you can come up to this little menu here and you have those same options right here as well and you have another option here for show pins and tools i have that set to auto that way if i close out of this menu when i come out of the image as soon as my cursor goes over the image you're going to see my adjustment pins or my mask pins on here as soon as i move the cursor into another part of the screen those overlays drop off that way i can easily see the image without those pins on there so i can get a nice clean view of what i've done and then if i want to go back in and grab one of those pens i just move my cursor back in and then if i didn't have the overlay already turned on so let me just hit the o key to turn that off the other thing you can do is you can actually come up and just hover on the mask itself so whether i hover just on the mask group here at the top or if i hover on one of the elements i've added as long as you're on the little thumbnail representation of the mask it'll automatically turn that on for you as long as you're hovering on it and then turn it off you just drag your mouse away all right moving onward and upward we're starting to get into some of the really cool new stuff here with this next section right here so i glossed over it earlier when i said we were going to come back to it but we have the select subject and select sky tools now as well these are both brand new to lightroom ecosystem they've never been in a lightroom version before and from what i've been able to play with them so far they work incredibly well and they're going to allow for a lot of new masks that either weren't possible before or were way more complicated and difficult and involved to create so let's just jump right into showing you how the smart selections work so we're going to mix things up a little bit typically as you all probably know by now i am a landscape and nature photographer but i wanted to show how this worked on portrait photography as well so i've grabbed this stock photo and if i come over to my masking panel which i already have open i'm going to just simply click on select subject that's all you have to do and depending on the speed of your system the power of your system it might take a few seconds but as it runs through and scans the image it's going to automatically create a mask based on the most defined subject in the scene that's something important to remember i'll get back to that in a second so right now i don't have the mask turned on so i'm going to hit my o key and now suddenly you can see just how well it has created a mask based on the subject it identified automatically this is using artificial intelligence machine learning all those cool buzzwords but it's scanning the image for what is the defined subject within the image in this case this image is a great example because it's very clear that this person is the defined subject now if we zoom in here we can see that it's not 100 perfect on this particular image if i turn the mask off you can see that where that little blur comes in here the color of his suit jacket is very similar to the color of the background so obviously stuff like that is not going to be perfect it's going to be harder for the ai to pick that up but i'll show you again a little bit ways you can easily fix that and go right in and begin your editing so that's how it works on a clearly defined subject within the frame if i come over to this next image here of this kind of food layout if we try this again you're going to see where right now it has some shortcomings so if i come over and select subject now i'm going to hit the o key to turn on my overlay you can see that in many regards it did a very good job of selecting a mask for what it thinks is the primary subject within this frame but you have this big section here that didn't get masked at all so when there's not a clearly defined subject this isn't perfect but it's still pretty darn good and what i'll show you again in a few minutes is how you can actually come in and quote unquote refine this mask a little bit to paint in the masking on some of these areas that missed now if i come over to this final image of the tennis player and i go through this again so i'm going to click select subject and now you can see once again it's done a pretty impressive job of automatically determining that this tennis player is the primary subject only place this one really quote unquote falls apart a little bit is around the tennis racket but if we even zoom in a little bit here and look at how well it picked up the outline of his hair and the details it's got there as you can see this is pretty impressive and it really opens up the door to do a lot of quick simple edits that in the past would have been much more difficult to achieve so really powerful tool here for especially for a first implementation of this really impressed again i'm not a portrait photographer but i can definitely see how especially for portrait photographers this would be huge so moving away from select subject let's take a look at select sky so here we are back at this image from yosemite i'm going to open my masking panel and i'm going to click on select sky and again it's going to go through the process of using ai machine learning to automatically detect where the sky is now if i turn on the overlay you can see that quickly it's got a fairly refined mask of what is the sky in this image and again if i zoom in here we can see that it is pretty darn detailed it's got all the trees selected properly it's not part of the sky and it's working pretty well the only place it gets a little bit off is when we start getting into some colors and tones where kind of the sky is blending in with the landscape itself a little bit if i turn this mask off you can see obviously there's a lot of similarity in terms of the color tones and you've got the clouds dropping down it makes us a little less obvious of where the sky ends and the landscape begins but still really impressive the job it's doing here now i can jump over to a different image here this is one i took from colorado last year and again i'm just going to come in here and click on select sky let it do its thing and once again we can see that it has done a pretty impressive job of determining which portion of the scene is the sky and if i zoom in we can again see that just this phenomenal job it did of selecting all of those trees as far as not being part of the sky mask here so really very impressive again especially just for our first iteration here i've already been playing around with this and man it is awesome for doing some quick edits in the sky and the way you can combine some of these things which again i'll show you in a few minutes it's just a game changer in terms of creating some really complex masks very quickly and easily and again there's never been anything like this within lightroom in terms of just being able to select a sky or select a subject things of that nature so this is absolutely awesome and you're going to see here coming up how you can start combining this with some of the other tools and just really creating some complicated masks very very quickly that really let you fine tune your editing nice and simple and quick all right so a few minutes ago i mentioned or made reference to the ability to do inverts on masks that you've created so let's step through that now show you some specific examples of what i'm talking about and how that again lets you get into more creative masking than what we've been able to do in the past so coming back into my color gradient let's just come over here and let's start with a radial so i'm going to click on the radial gradient i'm going to create a new mask and i'm going to hit the o key to turn on the overlay so now again we know that the white portion reveals the adjustments made with this mask whereas the black is going to be unaffected so with the radials you've got the ability to invert same as we've had before with all of these invert options the apostrophe key is also your keyboard shortcut to invert back and forth but where the new functionality starts coming into play is if i delete this out and i come into my color range and let's say i decide i'm going to choose some of the blue range here now for the first time instead of saying i want to apply my adjustment to that blue range i just selected now if i hit the apostrophe key i can do everything but that blue range so whereas with the previous versions of lightroom and range masking when you chose a color you had no way to exclude that color you was only including that color so now with that simple shortcut key of apostrophe you hit that and you can say okay i've chosen the blue but in this case i actually want to exclude blue from the adjustments i'm making real quick and simple and of course the exact same principle is going to work on our luminance masking as well so again if i delete out that color mask come in here and choose luminance range and let's just choose this general area of green now again we know that it's pulling in anything with that general luminance on screen or within the frame but again if i hit the apostrophe key it's going to do the inverse of that now in the case of luminance you could obviously do that by just selecting the different luminance range within the image so it's not quite as groundbreaking as the ability to exclude a color but still a quick and easy way to flip that and do the opposite of what you've selected now one more time let me come up i'm going to delete this and the last thing i'll show you is with the brush adjustment so exact same concept i'm going to come in here and let me just say i want to draw some weird brush adjustment in here for whatever reason but now once again just hit that apostrophe key and it's going to do the exact invert now another example where this really can come into play is with portraiture so coming back to this gentleman if i come in and open the masking panel again and i'm going to do select subject like i did earlier in the example now we have him selected as the main subject within the image but by hitting the apostrophe key and doing the inverse now suddenly i can come in here if i turn off this mask i can say i want to darken everything in the background but i don't want to impact him at all i want to make him stand out so look at how absolutely powerful this is and quick and simple this is compared to what we had to do in the past of again doing very careful brushing trying to use the auto masking with a brush or trying to do radial adjustments and adding to them or removing from them now with literally a couple clicks of the button i can darken this background down and leave my subject untouched so really cool to have the ability to do the invert on your subject selection as well again if i hit the apostrophe key you can see i'm flipping it back and forth another example going back to the tennis player so i already have the subject selected here if i hover on that you can see that so i'm going to select this mask now if i hit the apostrophe key i'm going to invert it hit the o key to turn on the overlay and you can see again this is what it was when i originally selected so anything in the white area would be impacted now if i just want to impact the background i'm gonna hit the apostrophe key invert it turn off the overlay with the o key and just like i did on the other one i could darken that background down i could blow it out if i wanted to you can do anything you want maybe you want to take down the saturation in the background you really make that subject stand out again with a couple simple quick clicks so you can see especially with this portrait stuff how really powerful this is and really streamlines the workflow that you've had or maybe you couldn't do it in lightroom before and you're relying on photoshop now you can keep it all within the lightroom ecosystem oh one more thing i nearly forgot is going back to some landscape examples the same thing works with the select sky smart selection tool so on this particular image if i come over you can see this is an image i worked on on one of the older versions of lightroom so it's got all these masks added in here from the old local adjustments i've added but if i wanted to i could come in and create mask select sky hit the o key to turn on that mask overlay you can see it's done an amazing job once again of selecting the sky and excluding trees and the mountain peaks and that but let's say i wanted to in this case tweak everything but the sky same exact concept as the other ones just hit that apostrophe key and now you've got everything but the sky selected using another example coming back over to this shot from colorado again i already have the sky mask on here so i'm just going to click on that mask to select it and as soon as i hit the apostrophe key just like the other one you'll see now it's inverted and again you can see all the little fine details the trees are selected almost perfectly on the horizon here so just an amazing way to give you that control using the smart selection tools not just literally for selecting the sky or a particular subject but for actually excluding those things and letting you work on the rest of the images so to me the combination of the smart selections along with being able to invert any type of mask you create is just so incredibly powerful and i'm already finding all kinds of unique and different ways i can use this to really streamline what i've been doing in the past and just speed up my process or improve my process and get better masking and better adjustments on specific areas of the image okay at this point you should have a fairly good understanding of all of the new functionality that comes with masks in terms of creating quote unquote basic mask using the new tools however there's a lot more to cover here i know there's getting to be a little bit long video so i'm going to do my best to get through it as fast as i can but you do need to understand this because in the long run having that understanding is going to make things much easier for you it's going to help you stay organized and really understand what you're doing as you work on images and get further into your editing process so let's jump back to this colorado image again and i want to start talking about the concept of masking groups and how you can name those groups and the elements within the groups keep yourselves organized so to help you better understand what i'm talking about i'm back in this colorado image we're going to do select sky now that's done its thing so right now that mask is saying everything in this image that is white is going to get adjusted so in this case it's the entire sky so if i want to drop the exposure on those blues that's great but you can see obviously it's also going to impact the clouds so now what i can do is come up here and do a subtract so what i'm essentially going to tell lightroom is i want to subtract a color range in this case we're going to do blues and then we've got several tones of blue in here so we're going to use shift and click to select several different points to make sure i get a good coverage of those blues so i have the color chosen if i hover on this you can see that of course the sky right now is black because i subtracted that from that sky selection and this is a kind of a preview of what we're going to be talking about soon here as well is the concept of add subtract intersect and all that fun stuff so right now i have the sky mask and i've subtracted from it anything in that mask that's blue so if i were to come in here now and adjust my exposure i'm only going to be impacting the clouds so this is a great way of saying well maybe i want to give those clouds a little bit of a bump in how white they are so i can come in and tweak that and make those adjustments on the flip side if i wanted to adjust the blues but not the clouds then i would simply invert the blue selection i made and now all of my adjustments are going to be impacting those blue tones and leaving the clouds alone so again this is just so absolutely powerful compared to what we've had before there's never really i feel like a broken record but there's never really been the ability to be this specific in where you're applying your local adjustments now if we look up at the mask panel here you'll notice that i have mask 1 with a color range selection in it and that sky selection in it so what you can do here is if you double click on the mask 1 header now you have the ability to rename that mask or mask group in this case so i could say that this is the sky blues only click ok and now i've got my sky blue only let's say i did want to also boost the whites in those clouds what i can do now is i've got the group selected if i click on this you'll see the actual adjustments made within that mask so again a single mask group can have multiple adjustments and types of masks in it if i collapse this back down and i come over to the little menu here i can now duplicate sky blues only so i'm going to do that but what i want to do here now is instead of impacting those blues i want to go back to my color range and uncheck the invert box because if you recall that meant i was going to be adjusting just those clouds now i have a new adjustment here that's based on the sky but only going to be impacting the cloud so now i can do what i had said earlier i'm going to brighten those clouds up maybe i'm going to add some clarity in them to add some additional texture maybe a little bit of dehaze to add some drama and now again if i double click on this i can say this is sky clouds only click ok and now i can very easily come back to this weeks or months later and not have to try to find the specific adjustment pen to remember what was i doing and which pen was i doing it on you can just come back to your panel and say oh well actually you know what i want to make those blues darker so i'm going to click on that sky blues only and now i want to darken those blues up a little bit so now if we look at the before and after of the image you can see with two sky selections and corresponding color selections what a dramatic difference that is made in the image just from a few clicks now you'll also notice that the actual landscape is getting darker that's because i brightened up the landscape earlier with boosting the shadows so that has nothing to do with these selection masks just in case you're wondering why you're seeing that impact now you'll notice if i come back into that masking panel and we go to the clouds only you'll notice if i come in and look at these clouds in particular that with the boost and exposure i've done that these are in a couple spots a little bit blown out so in the past what you would have done is if you're on a linear gradient or a radial or a brush you would have erased out of it so the same concept applies here so i can just hit subtract i would come down to brush or i could even use a radial in this case let's just do that so we're going to select a radial i'm going to click and drag this over and now you can see the radial i just created which in this case is still with the impact of the radial on the inside the white is inside but it has removed the adjustments from the clouds because they are within the interior of this radial to put that in a little bit more perspective if i zoom all the way out here and click the o button you can see in this case the clouds are all selected but where the radial is it's actually not selected now you've got a darker tone there or more of a black tone there telling you that is not being impacted so that's a way you can come in and further refine these masks just by doing some real quick and simple things now the other thing you can do is i've got now three adjustments under the sky clouds only mask group if i want to remind my future self of what i was doing with each of these just double click on those and how i can say radial to remove blowouts click ok and now you've got that color range as well i can say here double click exclude blues so no matter how far down the line i come back to this i'm going to know exactly what i did with each of these adjustments now the other cool thing you can do if i turn off the overlay mask here so we've seen that i made this little radial adjustment here to bring down the highlights in this particular patch of clouds where they were blowing out after my exposure and white adjustments if i wanted to come here and see what i just did now with this you can so if i come over to my panel here and go to this radial adjustment now i have an eye icon next to it i can either just click on it once and it's going to enable and disable that so you can see that patch of clouds if i'm hiding it or turning the eyeball off is blown out click it again you can see what i did with that radial adjustment and you can do that on any of these so if the exclude blues i can disable that and you can see that now my blues are being impacted with this adjustment again same exact thing with sky or you can do it with the entire mask group so if i wanted to see what this was you know i've got my blues only i want to see what the image would be if i just had the blue adjustments i didn't have any of these cloud adjustments and just come up here and click on that eyeball turn it on and off so i can see what exactly i've done with either an entire group or with the individual elements within a group as you can hopefully see by this point you can get pretty complex pretty quickly so i really do recommend definitely take advantage of the ability to rename your mask groups maybe you need to rename those individual elements within each group as well to help you keep track of what's what can't tell you how many times i've gone back to an image in the past and i've got like 15 brush pins on it and i don't remember what any of them did so again with the old versions of lightroom you had to click on them one by one and see what the sliders did turn on the overlay to see what elements of the image were impacted all of that headache and nightmare has gone away i've literally been begging adobe to add in the ability to name your adjustments for two three years now at least and here we are it's 2021 and we finally got it all this stuff is really cool but from an organizational standpoint this is by far the biggest thing they've added in with this new masking functionality super excited about it make sure you're taking advantage of it as well okay in that last segment you saw how i started to delve a little bit into how you can use subtract to modify a selection you've already made with a mask on top of that you also have the ability to add to a mask you've created so let's jump back into lightroom here so i can show you a little bit more deeply how you can use add and subtract to start modifying the masks that you've created already to continue to refine them and refine them and refine them so jumping back to this gentleman again this is the one where i've already got a select subject mask applied and i inverted it so that only the background is impacted in this case again the white portion of the image is going to be impacted and in this particular case this is the image where the mask wasn't quite perfect so if i zoom back in on this spot you can kind of see it right here if i apply the overlay you can see that the jacket kind of started to blend into the background and the mask wasn't quite perfect so what i can do here to clean this up is if i come up and select the mask expand it out and in this case i'm wanting to add white into that part that's bleeding through so what i'm going to do is i'm going to hit the add button and again you can do this a couple different ways i could do with a brush i could do it with a radial easiest way here is probably going to be with a brush so i'm going to come in and i'm going to size my brush to give me the control i need here and i'm just going to start painting this in to get that mask a little bit better than what was created now i'm doing this kind of quick and dirty i'd probably need to really change the feathering on this to get this a little bit more consistent with the rest of it however if i turn off the overlay you really can't tell that it's not quite perfect i mean we're zoomed in a fair bit here kind of messed that up now here i could hit the alt button and i'm going to subtract out that edition i just made so i can come back in here and clean that up a little bit it's not quite as obvious what i've done here if i turn that overlay back on and i come up and i click the eye icon to turn off that brush addition i just made you can see again really quickly and easily how i was able to refine that edge of the mask and get it more dialed into what i really want now zooming back out of this turning off the overlay again right now i'm only impacting the background here i've darkened it down considerably almost two full stops but let's suppose i also wanted to for whatever reason darken his hat so obviously that is part of the subject that was initially selected and then inverted so right now the hat is excluded from the adjustment i've made but what i can do is hit add and in this case i can now add a color range and say you know what i want to add the color of the hat into the mask and now you can see that the hat has gotten considerably darker and if i turn that off this is what it was before this is what it was after it's a really easy way again to pull in other elements of the image that weren't included in the original mask selection in this case the subject selection now you do notice when i added in the color of the hat some of the skin tone colors and in his tie and that was pulled in so what i can do now is come in to subtract hit that choose the brush again and now if i paint over these areas with the brush i'm cleaning this mask back up so that these areas aren't inadvertently being impacted by what i did to pull in that hat so now as i turn off the mask overlay you once again see that none of his skin is impacted and if i flip this back and forth so if i toggle it off before you could see a subtle shift in his skin tones now that is completely gone so just yet again another example of the refinement that you can do within this new masking environment within lightroom just super powerful and really the possibilities are almost endless with what you can do through the combination of add and subtract and then in the next section i'm going to talk about intersect as well where you can get further refinements by having intersections of different masks apply to each other and only the intersected area be impacted so let's jump into that here next so let's come up here and we're going to create a new mask and let's just say i'm going to create a radial gradient i'm going to create it over this pumpkin here and i'm doing that because i want to pull down the highlights on that pumpkin a little bit and let's just boost the saturation some on it and i want to change the hue a little bit too i want to go more towards a deeper orange so what we can see so far is i have adjusted the color and luminance of the pumpkin and it's subtle here if i make this more extreme you will be able to see though that i am including the area within the entire radial adjustment so including his jacket and his hand and all that that's not what i want to do so here what i can do is create an intersection of two different types of masks so what i'm going to do is i'm going to come here to mask 1 i'm going to click on the little menu here i'm going to select intersect mask with now i can choose to intersect it with any of these other options so in this case i want to do color range i'm going to come in here i'm going to select a box on the pumpkin and now suddenly like magic that jacket is no longer impacted because it's not part of the color range that's intersecting with that radial gradient so i have the color range aspect here and you can see it's pulling in anything in the image on the color because again a color range just like a luminance range mask is looking at the entire image but by combining it with that original radial mask as well if i turn on the mask overlay in general for this entire mask group now you can see that it is impacting only where the radial mask and that color mask i added to it are intersecting with each other and actually i can make this more obvious if i come down to the radial gradient and i turn down the feathering now you can see just how tightly i am impacting just what i want to impact now i am pulling in a little bit again of the tie because there are some colors in the tie that obviously match the color of the pumpkin so i'm going to do here again i'm going to zoom in i'm going to move this up a little bit and now i'm going to make sure i'm on mask one i'm going to subtract choose brush and just like i did on the prior example i'm going to brush out these areas that i don't want impacted as part of this particular adjustment now again i'm doing this pretty quickly so i'm not going to worry about perfection here but you just come in paint out the parts you don't want impacted again black is concealing the adjustment and by doing this i'm not going to have to worry about any of those other elements that are just getting picked up a little bit because they've got some orange tones in them from being impacted by this adjustment i made just for the pumpkin itself so now if i turn this mask one on and off you can see i am literally just impacting the pumpkin itself not his skin not his tie not his coat just that pumpkin because again it's the intersection of the radial and the oranges so where those two things overlap is where the adjustment is being made so it's a combination mask essentially again if i turn that overlay back on you can see just how exact this turned out and now i can adjust this pumpkin further make it look a little bit more natural zoom back out and there you go so let's hop over to landscapes again and use this yosemite photo as an example we'll come in here we'll go into the masking panel in this case i already have the sky mask applied so what i want to do here is a couple different things what i want to do first is impact the darker tones of the sky and cool those down a little bit so i've already got the sky mask so now what i want to do is tell lightroom i only want to impact the sky where it intersects with a particular luminance range so i'm going to come up to mask 1 intersect mask with luminance range and i'm going to come in here i'm going to say i only really want it in the darkest parts of the image so now if i hover that again luminance just like color as i mentioned in the last one it's going to look at the entire image but since this is an intersection mask if i come up and hover on this you can see now it's on the selection of the sky and only the darkest parts of the sky as with any luminance mask i could come in here and refine things a little bit if i wanted to i'm going to leave that alone let's say i just want to cool down those darker areas i'm going to do this pretty extreme just so it's obvious what i'm doing here i'm cooling down the darkest portions of the sky again if i turn on the overlay only the white areas are going to be impacted if i turn this on and off you can see the before and after this is with an enabled this is with it disabled and maybe i want to actually pull the exposure further down on those darker areas so this is an intersection of that mask now what i can come in and do is create a new mask i'm going to select sky again once it's done it's machine learning magic now i've got the sky selected again i want this to intersect with another mask but this time i'm going to have it intersect with just the highlights so i'm going to come in intersect mask with luminance range again this time i'm going to come over and i'm just going to select the brighter portions of the sky so now if i hover on this you can see it's got the brightest portions of the image and if i look at the mask in general specifically the brightest portions of the sky mask so now here i actually want to warm these tones up a little bit and again i'm going to go a little to the extreme just so it's a little bit more obvious i also want to bring those highlights down because there's some parts that are close to blowing out and maybe we want to add in some clarity to add some texture back in maybe we want to do dehaze to add an even more dramatic impact to it so by doing this i've now created two separate masks one that is specifically targeted towards just the brightest parts of the sky again i did a sky mask and i intersected it with a luminance range on the highlight into the spectrum that was combined with this original mask which again was a sky mass coupled with a luminous range on the darker end of the spectrum turn that one on and off you can see where it made the impact again overdone for the sake of the example if i come up to mask two and turn that one off again you can see it's only impacting those brightest parts of the image i'm pulling in some of those clouds that you couldn't even see before because they were blown out in the highlights i've warmed those highlights up but again for the sake of example this is showing you exactly what you can do by combining or intersecting masks on top of masks let's take a look at one more quick example i'm going to go back to the gradient color bars here and in this case what i want to do is let's do a luminance mask so we're going to select a luminance range so let's just say we're going to go for this range on the reds now by default it's selecting that luminosity range throughout the entire image but in this case what i want to do is i only want to impact that luminance range specifically on the reds and actually let's go down let's say we really want to just look at the mid-tones on these reds so i've clicked more into the middle range here you can see that there's fall off on the left there's a little bit of fall off on the right so i'm focused more on the mid tone range of the red bar but again it's looking at the entire image so right now i've got the mid tones of all the colors selected so this once again is where i can use intersect so i'm going to click into the menu intersect mask with select color range in this case because all i want to impact is the reds so i'm going to click into the reds now you can see that for the most part all of the other bars are excluded and i'm only going to be impacting that middle range of the red bar itself i can come over and further refine this if i hold down the alt option key on the refine slider i can see the overlay mask while i'm working so i can really pull that in exactly i can tweak it to exclude the other bars and make sure i just have the red and the specific portion of the red that i want now as i start making adjustments i can brighten that part of the red bar i can darken it i can do any other adjustment on here i could desaturate it and it's only going to impact the mid-tone ranges of those reds based on luminance intersecting with that red color i warned you that was going to be a doozy i really do hope you found this helpful i put a ton of work into this one there's just so much to cover here i knew it was going to be lengthy i didn't want to shortchange it and skip them over anything because there's just so much here that you really do need to understand to get the full value out of this new masking functionality within lightroom if you did find it helpful please of course give it a thumbs up i've got to say that by having a youtube channel i think i'm contractually obligated and if you're not already subscribed to the channel please go ahead and do that as well so you can follow along as i continue to release new videos going forward i will have a high level overview of all the new lightroom features note that if you're watching this after adobe max 2021 which runs from october 26 through october 28th that video is already going to be available for you but otherwise i really do appreciate each and every single one of you until next time take care [Music] you

Channel: Michael Rung Photography

Views: 32,974

Keywords: post processing, Lightroom Classic, Lightroom, Adobe Lightroom, lightroom masking, lightroom smart selections, lightroom editing, adobe camera raw masking, lightroom brush tutorial, lightroom radial filter, lightroom local adjustments

Id: Y7Fld8eEHsE

Length: 54min 53sec (3293 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 25 2021