LIGHTROOM V11 | 9 TIPS for USING the NEW MASK FEATURES in LIGHTROOM

in this video i'm going to give you 9 tips on how to get the most of the masking feature in the new adobe lightroom [Music] hello amigos this is pablo garcia the engineer photographer adobe lightroom changes to masking had been very well received and in this video i want to give you a number of tips to maximize your use of the changes if you see this error message when trying to use the new select subject or select sky you're gonna have to close lightroom and then start it again and hopefully you won't have any more problems but if the problem continues to happen what you need to do is to update the driver for your graphics card i have a windows 10 computer and that seemed to have done the trick but i also heard that apple computers are having similar problem close and open lightroom and update your graphic drivers this tip has to do about all photos photos that you took in the first half of 2017 or before when we had earlier versions of lightroom now i'm looking here at this image that is almost 10 years old and you can see that i have a couple masks in which i had done some minor adjustments for example to the eye and to the peak but let's say i wanted to add a new mask to use the new select subject it won't let me i cannot do select subjects that like sky color range luminance and depth are all grayed out the only ones are enabler the brush the linear gradient and the rail gradient and that has to do with the processed version process is basically the brains behind lightroom on how lightroom manipulate the colors and the adjustment they allow us to make you may recall that in earlier versions of lightroom we have a brightness slider that later got replaced with exposure and the texture and clarity sliders were not added until much later so what you have to do you have this situation when you cannot use the new tools is to update the process to do that go to the develop module and come all the way to the bottom to calibration and you're gonna see that this image for example is version two the most current one is version five that came with lightroom 11 released a couple of weeks ago if i update to version 5 just by clicking on it it may change the colors on the image because of that i recommend you make a virtual copy to keep your old edits now in this one i'm going to go ahead and update to version five that was very easy but you did see that the image did change quite a bit now i can create a new mask i'm gonna do a select subject it allows me to pick it and now it's gonna go ahead process it takes a few seconds and seems to be working and it did a very nice job on selecting this bird and now i can do my adjustments as desire another change that i really like that lightroom has implemented is our ability to add names to the different masks you know recall that in earlier versions every time we did the local adjustment we just got a pin we could hover over it to show us the areas that we had affected but if we wanted to see what we're done we have to go look at the sliders and try to remember what we did with that area now it's very easy to add names for example i'm going to add a new mask with the brush i'm going to paint here on top and i'm just going to darken it a little bit and now i'm going to double click the name of the mask group opens this box and now i can say darken top of photo and that's going to be the name of the mask so the next time i come to this image it's very easy to see what i did with that effect now this takes a little bit of time you know to add names to the different masks either at the mask group or the different elements under it the brushes or radio filters that you use by investing a little bit of time up front it can really save you a lot of headache later on prior versions of lightroom allow us to change the color of the mask overlay but the choices were very limited the choices were red green a lighter tone and a darker tone and while the red and the green gave us some flexibility sometimes wasn't enough so if i turn the mask overlay on this flower it's red and actually shows okay but i can actually change it to any color all i have to do is come into this little box where the colored red is click on it and now i can pick any of the colors at the bottom or any of the colors in the color picker and i can also change the opacity and by selecting a color and opacity i can pick a mask overlay color that really works for the image that i'm trying to edit i have this photo here i already did so this subject i'm going to turn on the mask and it actually did a very nice job right it selected this area very precisely but i have two problems with this image one it left out this step at the bottom and two is selected these two lamps so what i want to be able to do is to add this area right here and subtract the two lamps that's very easy to do let's do the add first so i come here to the mask window i click add i can select any of the choices that i have i'm going to select the brush in this case i'm going to make it a little smaller and i just paint over it and now i'm done now i'm going to subtract click on subtract with the brush and now i'm going to subtract and i can be careful you can be more precise than me and now i can make refinements to my image i can lower the exposure for example increase the contrast clarity and the light just remember to do basic math with that and subtract here we have this other image in which i already selected the subject let's see what is select so i did a very nice job of selecting the bridge and selecting this building now i'm going to zoom in but as you can see it also selected part of the background between elements of the bridge i need to delete or erase or subtract all these areas in between right and i can do that very easily as we mentioned earlier go to the subtract with the brush and subtract now we also learned earlier that i can change the color of the mask overlay but sometimes that's not sufficient another capability that is available is we can go here under the three little dots click on it and you have a number of ways to visualize your mask color overlay is the default is what we already have here but i can have the color overlay on a black and white image or have the image on black and white or on black you can continue clicking the different choices or you can do alt o and just cycle through the different ways to visualize the mask and find the one that works better for you in order to do the refinement that you want for some time we had had color range masks in lightroom but in order to use them we needed to apply a local adjustment first and then refine that adjustment with the color wrench with the latest changes now colored range has been promoted at the same level as the brush the linear gradient and the trail gradient and all the other choices let me give you an example i have here this flower with a yellow center and the rest of the flower is white i selected mask i'm going to come to color range and i get the picker and i can click on any of the colors there is yellow it did a very nice job i can also have the option of doing click and drag and that selects a wider range of colors and by hitting the shift key i cannot to the colors i already selected what whether that was a single point or a area and i can do that up to five times so if i do one more i'm gonna get this box that says i already did the five samples by using the five samples whether they're single colors or the little area with the click and drag now i did a very good job of selecting the center of the flower now i can increase my exposure for example add contrast a texture and clarity at some saturation and there we have it just like the color mask the luminosity mask has also been promoted we can use it at the same level as any of the other tools for this image i already darkened the sky and also made some adjustments to the foreground adjusting clarity texture and so on now how can we use the luminosity mask you can use it by itself or as part of refining some of the other masks with adding and subtracting let's use it by itself i'm going to do add a new mask luminosity range if you look now we have from dark to white i'm going to do dash and burn so let's start with burn we're gonna darken the shadows so i'm gonna bring the highlights down and you can see how the image is changing this little box represents the areas that are gonna be affected and you can see the dark in our image i can move the triangle to the right and that's basically smoothing the transition on the shadows and gonna make it a little smaller and now i'm gonna reduce the exposure by something like about a third of a stop and now i did basically a very fast burn as part of dashing burn now i'm gonna add another mask i'm also going to do luminosity range this time i'm going to do the opposite i'm going to bring the shadows up i'm going to bring the whites down a bit i'm only looking at an area of highlights and i'm gonna smooth it out and in this case i'm going to increase exposure something about a third now it is also affecting the sky right they did a good job on this library on the board and some of the other highlight areas but i don't want to affect the sky so i can subtract the sky i come to subtract select sky it's going to take a few seconds to process and now i have it so now i can refine how much additional exposure i did to my highlights and whether you want to do any additional updates to that maybe i warm it up a bit and there you have it by using the luminance range it's very easy now to do dutch and burn globally to our image now in this image i'll really use select subject to select the flower and it did a very nice job and then with that selection i made some changes to the photo you know it reduced the highlights increased texture and clarity and so on now what i want to do is for the balance of the image i want to maybe reduce brightness and saturation but i don't have a select background so what i can do is start with select subject and and take the inverse of that selection to do the rest and i have two ways of doing it first i'm going to go here to my mask that i have created for the flower if i go to the three dots it allows me to duplicate i'm gonna duplicate that mask in that group now i go to the subject which was the flower and i'm gonna click on the three dots and i'm gonna invert it and now i have selected the background i'm gonna come here to my sliders i'm gonna double click an effect to reset all of them and now i'm gonna darken i'm gonna reduce clarity i'm going to reduce texture i'm going to reduce saturation and there you have it now i can turn off that mask you can see how it was brighter before and now with the effect that we just did and it allows the flower to stun more i'm going to turn off this mask because there's another way of doing it and the other way basically starting from scratch i'm going to create a new mask select this subject i know i already did a very good job of selecting the subject i'll just let it compute again and now i'll basically do the same steps i invert and do the adjustments that i did before there we have so you can either invert an existing mass they already had or you can start fresh create a new mass select a new subject or sky or whatever and then invert that one talking about inverting masks we have to be careful because at times it's not going to work for us let's try this so i have this mask i use select subject and it did a very good job of selecting the flower but it didn't select the stem right to do the stem i had to add if i click on that i'm going to add with the brush and i'm going to add the stem and i'm going to refine it a bit and let's say we're there okay now i can make the adjustments that i want to do like adding texture adding clarity maybe reduce the highlights and make that flower really pop i'm going to increase saturation now i want to work on the background i want to make the background darker i want to reduce the saturation of the background unfortunately if i go here to the mass that i created that includes both the initial select subject and the brush in which we added the stem there is no invert at this level now i'm going to try what i show you just before and i'm going to duplicate the mask and now you may say well i have the two elements of that mask the brush and the subject i'm going to invert the subject i'm going to invert the brush i'm going to show what the mask is and now it's selecting everything and that's not what we wanted right we want to adjust the background why this thing didn't work let's try to see it pictorially here here we have the photo and the area that we selected which was the flower to that we want to add the area that we selected with the brush which was the stem when we add these two masks together any of the areas that have been selected whether in the select subject or with the brush now are part of the combined mask that's what we did but then when we inverted that original select subject we ended up selecting everything that is in red and the flower wasn't selected then we did the same invert with the area we did with the brush and we ended up here but the operation of adding both of them did not change so when i add these to these anything that is in red is going to result red on being selected which is this one right here which is basically not what we want so basically to invert these we wanted to go to the mask group click on invert and have this is what gets inverted but lightroom today with version 11 doesn't work that way so let's go back to the flower so we have the flower i'm gonna remove that second mask that we created so we're down to the original with just the subject now to select the background now i have to take it in steps and this is something you have to do every time you have one of these compound masks you cannot just invert it so i'm going to start with a new mask i'm going to select the subject and at this time i'm not gonna add the stem you need to work right at the beginning on your very first selection in this case was select subject so i'm gonna take select subject i'm gonna invert it now the select object is inverted now i need to subtract the stem so i'm going to subtract with the brush and so now the area that i have selected is everything around the flower and the stem so now i can reduce my exposure reduce texture really reduce the clarity to make it very soft reduce the saturation and as you can see it worked very well i can turn this off that was before and this is now so we have to be careful every time we invert especially you're having a compound group where you have more than one element as part of that mask it won't allow you to invert right away so that's something you have to keep in mind well amigos i hope you like these nine tips about the masking changes in lightroom i'm going to leave you with this other video i did on how well or not select subject works please take a look at it and as always please subscribe send me a comment give me a like help me grow the channel and i'll see you next time

Channel: Pablo GE Foto

Views: 73

Keywords: pablogefoto, pablo ge foto, lightroom, adobe lightroom, lightroom masking, lightroom update, new lightroom update, lightroom masks, lightroom classic 2022, new lightroom masks, lightroom classic 11, photo editing lightroom, lightroom 11, new lightroom update masking, lightroom update masking, lightroom classic masking, how to use lightroom masks, tips on using lightroom masks, lightroom version 11, mask updates in lightroom, lightroom update 2022

Id: aFF0PKGCK7c

Length: 19min 26sec (1166 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 21 2021