Lightroom Masking - What Does Intersect Do?

i see a lot of questions and confusion over the intersect feature that lightroom classic adobe camera raw lightroom cloud version it's in the masking tools over what that intersect feature does because a lot of the tools in that whole masking section are pretty intuitive but intersect i don't really think so i put together this video i got a landscape portrait and a wildlife example for you so get a little bit of a feel for what intersect is how it works and then a few different examples on how you can use it on your photos so let's go ahead and jump in so i've got a couple photos open inside of lightroom and we'll do two examples here and then i'll jump over to photoshop camera and i'll do a landscape example so you see how this works in a couple of different places we're going to start off in our masks panel and i'm going to take my radial gradient of course you've got to be using the past you know october 2021 you've got to be using that version of lightroom classic also works in the cloud version of lightroom also works in adobe camera raw so you've got to be using one of those versions to see this so we go to the radial gradient here i'm going to show you a very simple example i'm just going to make a big circle and make it really really dark all right again this isn't real world but this will help us figure out what intersect is doing now what i'm going to do is go to this radial gradient click on the pop-out menu and choose intersect with brush all right you get all the same options as you're creating a new mask all right what we're doing i'm going to do here is just intersect it with the brush and then watch what happens as i paint outside nothing happens but as i paint inside we start to see the adjustment so what we're what we're seeing here is we were only seeing the adjustment where our two selections if you will whatever you want to call them masks selections are overlapping with each other we basically we had a radial gradient and we said intersect it with the brush which means you're only going to see the results of where the two of those intersect with each other all right so keep that in mind that's a very very simplistic example of it but it should hit the point homo what intersect is doing so let's delete all masks there so how could we approach this photo we could go to select color range let's say i want to select her shirt and do something change the color of it make it brighter or darker it's green so i'll go to color range and i'll just make a color selection there and you can already see the problem is it's selecting all the other greens in the photo and of course i could use my brush i could subtract i could do any number of things to try to remove the the green to try to remove whatever adjustments from the rest of the photo but intersect can actually work pretty good here so let's go back a couple of steps and instead what i find works best with intersect is to refine my selection first so get as close to the area as you want so in this case i go to select subject now i've got a selection of her and i can again change the color do whatever i want to do here but it's obviously affecting more than just that but what about if i intersect it with so i'll click on the little pop out menu here i can intersect with and i could intersect with color range right because there's nothing else on her that's green really so i could intersect with color range and select the color range and watch what happens look at her face because her face is very green right now so look at her face see so what i just did there is you're only seeing the effect where my select subject and my chosen color range intersect with each other that's where you're seeing the results of this adjustment is where they intersect with each other so as i make changes here and make changes here you can see that now in this case there's a little bit of reflective light on her hair which is why her hair is is uh it's changing a little bit here not a lot but just to show you nothing's ever perfect don't ever look it was very very difficult to find a one-click solution for anything here just to show you what you could do now is choose subtract with the brush and then i could just come up here and paint and get rid of that and it's nice and easy because her hair is very very separated from her sweater where when in that original example when i did color range and it was bleeding from her shirt into the background and everything that would have been pretty painstaking for me to go there and try to trace that around with my brush tool so that wouldn't work really good now before i go to the next example i just want to call out one thing and that is i know the keyboard warriors are lining up to say matt couldn't you have done a select subject and subtract this and this and then yeah guys there's five different ways to do all this stuff all right don't think that intersect actually can't be done three to five other different ways here with your masks panel i just want to show you what the tool does each one of them has its own purpose so you've got to decide as you're starting to work which one's a little bit easier for your workflow but just understand right away that there is not just one way to use all of this stuff there's no rule to it okay so let's go ahead and delete those masks let's jump to a wildlife example so same idea i'm not even going to bother doing color range i want to maybe work on the body of the bird here brighter darker change of color i'm not even going to bother going to color range because you know what it's going to do it's going to select the bird and the background so instead i'll do what i did before select subject that gets me close i'll go to that sub layer inside of there i'll click on the pop-out menu and i'll intersect it with and this time i'll intersect it with a brush all right so i'll intersect it with the brush and now i'll paint and now you're only going to see the intersection and it's not perfect but it's close enough you're only going to see the intersection of where my brush painting intersected with the select subject now i have access to that part and i can go in here whether i want to make it brighter whether i want to make it a little bit more yellow whatever whatever it is you want to do that part of the photo you now have an easier way to get to just that area and just like before you could go to subtract i could take my brush and you know i could have been a little bit more perfect about doing it in the beginning or just clean it up with a little bit of subtraction here at the end this is a perfect time for a very quick word from our sponsor so promise i'll keep it fast if you're just getting into these masking tools and you haven't really gotten to see the power of all of them yet i encourage you to check out my lightroom masking deep dive course uh these tools i think are the biggest changes to hit lightroom really ever and they make editing for me personally they make it more fun and they make it faster and they give me less reasons to jump over to photoshop to need to make selections so it's a learning curve i totally get it it's definitely a different way to do things but i made this course it's very affordable and it's very quick to watch it's not seven hours long i made this course to help you get through that steep learning curve a lot faster and really start enjoying these tools so check the link in the description and i hope you'll take a look at that masking deep dive back to our tutorial let's take a look inside of photoshop camera i've got a photo open so i'll go filter camera raw if you had a raw photo it should open automatically into camera raw so we'll look at a landscape photo here i don't use it as much on landscape photos but in this example you could we could make a case for it so what i want to do is work on the trees both in the above the water and in the reflection here all right so let's go to our masking tools again whether however we came into camera raw they're all right there well what could i do here i could go to luminance range that would be a good one and i could select select my luminance range here i probably selected too much let me try that again so let's go select a little bit less this time and it's still still selecting too much i could always reel in my luminance range i could do that the problem i'm going to face is there's going to be a lot of overlap between the luminance range that i work with here and even some areas in the sky no matter how much i try to get that in the biggest problem is going to be some of these dark areas of the sky are going to overlap with the trees and there's not going to be a good way to get rid of them precisely because there's a lot of detail edge detail there all right so let's undo that and let's go back and instead what i could do is again refine this as much as i can so i'll do select sky now i don't want the sky but what i do want to do is get the sky out of this i don't want it any part of my selection so now what i can do is just invert that so now i have everything selected but the sky all right let's make this a little bit brighter if we want to actually you know what i'm going to leave it as the red overlay i think that actually shows it off pretty well now that i have that now i can go and intersect my select sky which is actually the inverse it's almost like select foreground i could intersect that with luminance range and i could just go in here and click on that and now what i've done is i've eliminated that part of the sky and even in the reflection from being part of the selection and of course i could still go down here and refine this luminance range we still have ways to do that so i could refine this so it just gets into the tree area down there so maybe something along those lines and i could come in here make it a little bit brighter maybe add a little bit of contrast to it warm it up a little bit and even increase the saturation so but what i did here is i gave myself a really precise and fine-tuned way to work and direct my attention toward a very very specific area of the photo and i found the intersect feature for that photo helped me do it the best way now if you're new to these features if maybe you're just picking up this intersect video and you haven't really dove into all the other stuff i've got a free video right here on youtube it's actually 20 minutes long but it is much more in depth into what these masking tools are what they do what they uh how to use them all that fun stuff so if you haven't seen that one yet that would be a great place to go next

Channel: Matt Kloskowski

Views: 17,316

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Id: TxkD4vLc90A

Length: 10min 8sec (608 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 11 2022