Luminar AI Tutorial, ep 11: How Masking Works

[Music] hey guys i'm jim what's happening thanks for coming back this is episode 11 in my luminar ai tutorial series there will be a total of 12 episodes so episode 10 by the way which was a link to right there was about local masking this episode is about masking in general i think i mentioned in that video that i would do a little bit more deeper dive on masking and there are essentially three kinds of masking in luminar ai you have a brush mask also known as a paint mask you've got a radial mask which is like an oval or circle shape that you can adjust and the third one is a gradient mask and so i'm going to jump into each of those three and show you how they work and explain why you care hopefully you care if you're watching this video you probably do care but anyway let's get into it i'm gonna go ahead and get onto the local masking tool now keep in mind by the way that the tools up here like enhance and structure and things like that you have the ability to mask any of these tools except for light and all you do to get to it is you click on that little icon that looks like the head of a spray paint can at least to me but all these other tools you can mask i'm going to show local masking but it works exactly the same whether you're using a local mask or a mask on one of these tools the reason i'm using local mask is because i want to increase the exposure of this photo and mask it in and you can't mask on the light tool which is where exposure is up here on essentials so that's why i'm in local masking hope that helps so i've got a gray sheet of paper which is super boring and now it's a white sheet of paper which is equally boring but it's visually very easy to understand and i'll show you how masks operate on your photo so let's say let me just hit reset let's say i have this gray piece of paper and i want to make it white but only in certain parts so i make my adjustment turn it white but i want to paint it in so a paint mask also known as a brush mask is up here and you can just get to any of the options by clicking that drop down menu but a paint mask is as the name implies you're painting it in or brushing it in and by the way a mask is basically just a paint job you're just painting in adjustments and what this does for you is gives you incredible control and power over what your photo will look like at the end because maybe you want to add a little bit of something there take away a little something else over there do a little thing here a little thing there blah blah blah you want to customize your image masking is the way to help you customize it because if you're not masking that basically means that the edits are essentially global which means they apply across the entire photo sometimes you don't want things to apply across an entire photo so let me show you how this works when you're in the masking menu you have radius softness and opacity radius is how big is the thing right so as i slide this you'll see this visual representation of my cursor and that is basically the size so that's what radius is now softness is how hard of an edge do you have so i'm going to make this really big so it's easy to see sorry right really big softness if you look at this as i'm moving it left less soft meaning hard more hard when i go all the way to the left there is no transitional zone you can see that inner circle and that outer circle as i make it softer they're getting further apart which means the zone between the inner circle and the outer circle indicates how much of a transition occurs and i'll show this on the image in a second so i generally go very soft usually at 100. an opacity is just and and this cursor won't change but opacity is how much of it applies like do you paint in at 100 or 50 whatever so i've got a big radius here i'm going to make a little bit smaller i've got very high softness i'm going to paint this white onto my gray sheet of paper because remember this is a gray sheet of paper it's white currently because i've increased the exposure but i only want white right here so i'm going to paint that in and now i've got a white spot and what you'll notice is that it's very white in the center and then it gradually fades back to gray and that's because i have a lot of softness now if i go the other way and go zero softness which in other words is a hard edge then if you do this you can see my red or pink whatever color that is that red to me shows me where my mask is being applied and there we go i just painted in with a really hard edge zero softness versus a hundred zero softness you go from 100 white to 100 gray there's no transitional smoothing uh or edge right whereas over here you have a hundred percent white and then it gradually as you can see as you go further out it fades into gray so that's what masking does and that's what softness is and then opacity at 100 opacity i'm painting in the whole thing but if i take this to 50 opacity and zero softness i'll do that under here so you can see the same zero softness you can see it's not a hundred percent white it's 50 white because i'm at 50 opacity and now if i move the softness all the way to 100 and the opacity i leave at 50 you can see i've just painted the same kind of thing i've got a soft edge so the transition is very gradual and yet the underlying white is only showing through it fifty percent because of my opacity hope that clarifies what that all means and by the way that was a paint mask also known as a brush mask i use the word brush all the time that's what it's always been called in luminar previous editions it's now called a paint mask but it's the same thing so don't let that confuse you i'm now going to show a radial mask a radial mask as the name implies is a circle and in fact when you click on that it says click and drag to draw a circle now remember i've got a gray sheet of paper when i turn this off you see gray when i turn it back on it's all white because i've bumped the exposure all the way but i can click and drag to draw a circle and i'm going to do that right here and you will see what's happening is hey jim you didn't paint that in you erased it from the center and left everything else white yes i did and that's because i'm on this left tab if i were to use the right hand side i get the reverse of it and so let me click forward slash to hide my mask and you can see that's the opposite or the invert so you can kind of go back and forth between those but here's the thing i'm going to go with this one you can see this red circle is the inner circle you're getting all the white coming through and between the inner circle and the outer circle it starts with all the white and gradually fades to gray and then outside of this outer circle you get nothing right so that's the transitional zone and you can adjust the size of that transitional zone you can pull that outer circle now note i did not pull on that little dot right there i pulled this from somewhere else so i can increase the amount of transitional zone if i want to increase the size of the area that that is pure white i can drag that inner circle in fact i'm just going to do that to make it easier to see now these allow you to expand the shape in different directions so i can increase or you know lengthen or squish squishing i don't know squish that shape and i can do the same thing top and down so i can squish that if i want to do that or i can increase it if i want to make it kind of a typical oval and the last thing if you see my mouse hovering outside this circle you can see it's a double-headed mouse cursor that just allows you to rotate this guy so that you can position it as you need to position it within your photo okay i've hit reset and once again i'm going to bump the exposure to 100 and this time we're going to go down to gradient mask gradient mask is a line so all you do is you click somewhere and you start dragging you can drag up or you can drag down but in this case i clicked and dragged up so what's happening is with the gradient from this bottom line and below i'm getting 100 white from that bottom line to the center line i start to fade to gray a little bit from the center line to the upper line i fade to gray more and then outside that upper line it's 100 gray completely untouched so forward slash show you the red area which indicates where the masking is occurred it's all red below that line i start from red and start gradually getting to pink towards that center from the center up i go from pink to gray and then gray completely so that is what a gradient mask does now it's a straight line but as you can see it's not always level so you can adjust the level but it's always going to be a straight line you can also expand this gradient zone if you want a really smooth and broad transitional area or of course you can com sort of compact that to make it very much a quick transition right so there you go there's a quick transition and here oops i went the other way here is a more smooth transition so that's how a gradient mask works and by the way you could start from the top or the bottom it doesn't matter you can also start from the sides or you can start from the bottom and tilt it if you only want to mask in on that side do that or if you want to mask in from that side do it that way that's basically how the three different types of masks work the other thing to know is you have fill invert clear copy paste and show mask i'm going to go ahead and hit clear which as you can see completely clears everything even though i've got the exposure still at 100. so maybe you want to clear it and start over you could come in and redraw your gradient or if you want to cover the whole thing a fill mask will just fill your image with the entire edit which in this case is a bump in exposure all the way to the top the other controls here you can invert so the opposite of a fill mask would be an invergent mask which is basically taking it away and then also if i wanted to copy this and use this mask again on another tool i would just say copy and then when i open the next tool i would go into that masking menu and click paste and it'll paste the mask in there for you so hopefully that gives you a good idea of what this is all about i'm going to close that i'm going to get a photo and show you how it works okay so here's a landscape photo i'm going to add a basic texture and again remember you can use masks on these other tools on the essentials the creative the portrait and the pro tab as well i'm showing it in local masking only because it kind of makes it easy so in this case i want to increase the exposure in the foreground so i'm going to bump up the exposure and again it's a global edit until you mask it in well this is a perfect one for a gradient mask because a gradient mask is as you recall a straight line again doesn't have to be level in this case it's going to be level and straight and i'm going to do something about like that i'm going to increase the transitional zone a little bit so as you can see my exposure increase is 100 percent down on the bottom and then it kind of gradually fades in here and then disappears completely and i was able to quickly come in and just i'm going to hit enter to close the mask and just quickly brighten that foreground so if i turn that off there it is before and there it is after now you can add more of course with the local masking tool so i could come in add another basic mask and in this case maybe i want to take the warmth down and increase the saturation and vibrance and i want to do a little bit of that in the water once again gradient mask and i can just do something like that and the reason i didn't copy and paste is because maybe i don't want that saturation to bleed up into that patch of grass i just want it in the water and then i can add another one and in this case maybe i want to do a little bit cooler and a little bit of saturation and vibrance and this time i'm going to take a gradient mask and i'm going to pull it down and just get that into the sky and again i didn't copy and paste any masks although you can but i just wanted to do that in those areas quickly and not copying and pasting also kept me from being too specific about it in other words i kind of wanted to control the mask because it was a little bit different in the top than it was in the bottom things like that point is you have a lot of control over the mask where it goes and that sort of thing and i realize i got spots in the image there's a lot more that needs to be done this is not an edit this is just showing you how those masks work now i'm going to get another photo actually you know what no i'm going to use this photo i'm going to click plus add a basic mask again and this time i'm going to add a bit of structure and that's a whole lot across this photo but this time i'm using a paint mask and all i'm going to do is paint that structure here across this land and that's going to be something about like that i'm going pretty quick and i'll paint it into the grass here too and all i've done is you can see it's really popping and it's too much i need to turn it down but again this is not an edit this is just an example of what you can do but what i've done is used one gradient mask for the water a separate one for the sky and a third mask and this one is a paint or a brush mask and i've used that on the land mask in the center of the photo as well on that left hand side so that's an example of how different kinds of masks can help you operate and control specific parts of your photo and giving you that kind of control so you get the light the color the detail whatever it may be apply it exactly how you want it and exactly where you want it that's what masking does for you now just to get up here on the essentials tools i've got a different photo and let's say in this case i want to add some details i'm just going to drag a whole bunch of stuff to the right i don't really care how it looks i'm not trying to say this looks good i'm just showing you how it looks and i'm doing a lot to exaggerate the effect but if you look at this photo there it is before and there it is after lots of detail has been added but this is a great way to use a radial mask so i'm going to click and drag my circle it defaults to that one so i'm going to click on this other button and what i want to do is i want to get my inner circle i need to pull this in i don't want that big of a transitional zone i'm going to collapse that shape a little bit i'm going to rotate it a little bit and i want to expand that inner circle to get more of that detail across more parts of the photo and you notice that the outer circle here is going outside the photo doesn't matter on a radial mask you're basically the transitional zone you know you can compress that a little bit if you want to and i'm going to pull that in but basically it's okay that that outer circle runs off the side of the image so let me close the masking and if i turn this on if you look at the before everything's a little bit soft and this was just an iphone shot an experiment i was doing but a couple of old cameras a couple of old journals an old book whatever there it is before and there it is after where i've added the detail pretty much just on the core stuff in the center of the photo so that's how a radial mask can come into play so that's a high level overview to get you started on masking and i'll come back and probably do deep dives about each specific type of mask but this was intended to get you up and running really quickly with a paint or brush mask a radial mask and a gradient mask three super powerful very useful tools to get used to and to learn how to use in luminar because they give you so much power and control over your photo for light detail color all the big things that you're editing with an emphasis on you can isolate those aspects and bring them up and mask them in to make it look exactly the way you want it to look so it's about control and i think in luminar they make the masking super easy and that's why i like it so that's a summary tutorial about the three different kinds of masks hopefully that answers any questions you may have thank you for watching my friends i'll be back tomorrow with the episode 12 the last one in this series thanks for watching i'll see you then my friends take care of yourselves out there and adios

Channel: Jim Nix

Views: 7,844

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

Id: i0fl9FKfer0

Length: 16min 4sec (964 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 23 2020