Major Updates To Masking In Ligthroom Classic

hey gang scott here well adobe they overhauled masking in lightroom classic in a big way and i want to walk through some of these changes that have been introduced into the masking tools there are a lot of other videos out there that will go through the mechanics of you know this is where the sliders are this is where the new buttons are and so forth i want to work through an example and show you how i'm using the new masking tools how these things intersect and interact and intersect that's a word that's going to come up here that's kind of important it's a cool thing but i thought we'll walk through an example and i'll use this photo here it's almost halloween and uh this is this is a an appropriate photo and it's going to let us look at all of the different characteristics of these new masking tools the very first thing you'll notice is there aren't multiple tools in the masking area anymore we just have a single masking icon we click that and we have a whole bunch of options now there are the same ones we've had for a long time we have brush we have linear and radial gradients we can do our color and luminance range masks those are kind of separated out now so they're not like bundled in or tucked in underneath a gradient or radio you can just start using them we also have some ai powered selection tools these are kind of like borrowed from photoshop they brought them into lightroom and so what we're going to do with this photo is try out all these different things we're going to do the sky we're going to do subject i'll show you the classics with the radials and the linears but also how they can intersect with color ranges and luminance range masks and for this photo a few things we're going to target we're going to do something to the sky and this guy's really boring in this we'll just do something so you can see the tools work we're going to do some subject work uh the scarecrow do some color work on the greens and then some targeted things to the wagon and that'll let us use all of these tools so let us start with select sky now i click this a couple of things happen first you notice this new little box that popped up i'm not sure why it collapsed on me normally it pops out and looks like this you get this masking panel and this is where all of your masks are controlled it is uh i like it it's it's much more convenient you can really see these are the different masks i have on my photo and as you're adding more and more localized adjustments this panel makes it much simpler to find what you're looking for you're not hunting for individual pins where did i make that change in a radial or a gradient i can go into my list of masks here and of course you can name them if you so desire double clicking on them you can name them and you can expand and contract them but automatically of course this detected the sky it found the sky i have all these sliders here apply to this mask this mask auto created add the show overlay turn it off and on minor little feature which is actually a major feature you can change the color of the overlay for a custom color i like to use magenta for a lot of them because you know like a strong magenta if i push this far this is not a color that occurs in nature very naturally so it's a good overlay for your photos it's very easy to tell where our mask is they did a great job in the sky so now let's do some changes here right so now let's just do a couple of token changes so we can see something happening i'll cool the sky down a little bit bring the exposure down a little bit sorry we've got a sky out there right the key thing is the masking hit select sky go find it for me and it did let's create a new mask we'll create another mask and i get that same pop-up so i'm still in my masking area i have all these options i want to select the sky again it will go off figure out the sky select it and then i can invert that right invert now i'm targeting everything else in the photo so you have inversion for all of these things as well and here let's turn off the overlay maybe we'll add a little bit of clarity let's push it up a little far so you can see something happening there in just all the foreground great so that's uh that's two things there you can also see we have these masks and if let's keep track of things we'll double click this was the sky all right this was the foreground and if you notice when i dragged over the mask if i hover over the mask or over a pin it will automatically show me that overlay so if you want to get a quick look what's that mask okay that's what my foreground is let's do a third one let's try a color range this time we'll target the greens create a mask and this time i'll choose color range i get my picker and let's pick something that's green i'll start with the grass down here alright i'm hovering over the pin the overlay is showing me things there there is all the things that thinks are green we have our refinement we can have less of that green or more of that green i think i'll pull that back and make a little bit less and now i can do the adjustments here if i take my hue and start pushing this to the right i'll push it very far we can see those greens really get popped we'll pull that back a little bit so it's something a little more natural a couple of clicks and i have the color range mask for the entire photo it's in my masking panel we'll double click on that and call it the greens okay how about we work on a luminance range mask let's work on the wagon and get some extra texture in the wagon itself so we'll create a new mask and we'll use a luminance range mask because this will target the no the really the tones we select but we can target you know shadows or highlights out here i'll just click and i'll drag a little box i like to select multiple tones with my luminance range mask okay there we go we got the selection automatically now lumens range if you recall from the older lightroom masking tools you had the end point so you could set the black and white point and then you had to smoothen the slider to see how gradual or how crisp you want that cut off to be that fade off the interface is a little bit different now but the principles are the same so let me click on show luminance so now we're seeing that luminance range and we're seeing it in red right so this inner box this is really the range i can make that range tighter and we'll see less and less so i'm only looking at the really deep shadows these pins on the other ends these are our smoothness so i take that and make it very crisp or very faded and now i can take this range i can position the range wherever i want let's make this a very very tight narrow band and you can see i can have just my shadows affected i can start rolling all the way through my mid-tones up into the highlights will eventually start bleeding up into the sky so this is how this tool works we set the range with like this rectangular box and then you set the smoothness and you have individual controls the smoothness can be more gradual on the highlights and or on the shadows and they do not need to be the same so it's a very nice powerful change to the interface looks a little weird when you work with it but this is how it's operating now i said i wanted to work on the wagon right so around here is kind of you know i'm getting into that wagon there let's uh make sure i can pick up some of those mid-tones in the wagon i'll stretch that out a little bit more i'm working away looking at the photo i'm watching the wagon all right the wagon looks pretty well covered now of course i've got a bunch of other extraneous stuff i mentioned that word intersect this is a this is a a buried thing but it's cool here's my luminance range here's my mask if i click on the dots i can intersect this mask that i have with something else and i will use a radial gradient so now i drag that gradient and that same luminance range mask is still working for me right you can see that as i'm stretching this out i'm getting just the this magenta area that i set up which is my wagon that's where i want this to be targeted and so i can just shape this around here do something like that cool let's turn off the overlay and so we can really see what's happening let me push exposure around you're seeing that wagon is what's really getting popped right there's a little bleed here and there but for for my purposes which will be to add texture and add clarity that wagon is going to get a very nice pop before that change after that change so intersect lets you take a mask that might be affecting a broad area of your photo and tighten it into a localized area and you can intersect using a radial it's like my preferred method you can use gradients you can use the brush now the last thing we have not looked at yet is subject and this one i was curious to see how this was going to work on this photo select subject you know what is the ai going to do and it went around and it looked at it you know pretty close it found the scarecrow it found these wagon wheels too so the ai is doing a couple of things that are interesting but it found what is primarily my subject great let me show you one other feature we have these add and subtract buttons these let us add or subtract from the mask in this case i want to subtract and i will just use a brush to subtract so here's my brush and now i'll start painting away the areas that i don't care about for my subject and i'll be kind of you know quick and sloppy here for the masking because this is not so much about scott's brushing skills it's about showing you these new masking tools and i can get rid of that wagon wheel i can get rid of this wagon wheel you know this is one of those where i could have done an intersection with an elliptical to just get the scarecrow and then use a brush to do some really fine-tuned cleanup okay and how about we just increase the exposure of our subject a little bit maybe a touch of texture and we're basically finished with this photo i didn't name my other two masks but to be consistent we'll call that the wagon and we'll call this the scarecrow and then we are finished but this entire set of masks here all manageable and you can see what happened right the sky see what did with the sky with the foreground the greens the wagon and then the scarecrow itself and at any time if you need to make adjustments like those greens look a little bit too green pick greens these are the sliders i can back that off make that a little more tame the foreground notice the sliders now match my selected mask i can make adjustments there maybe i want a little more clarity and so on down the line so this new masking experience in lightroom it's really slick and it's very powerful it will take you a little bit of getting used to especially if you're used to the older classic school with luminance range masks and the and so forth but i really do like the newer interface there are some nice improvements uh the intersections are very nice the fact that you can just visualize and see all of your different masks in a panel as opposed to being in pins and scattered across brushes and radials and gradients everything is in one place it's really really nice especially that new interface on the luminance range mask that is a nice treat individual fades to the shadows into the highlights this is all really cool stuff and it really can take your masking to the next level right in lightroom without having to bounce out to another application i hope you found this video useful play with the tools get used to them there's a lot of power here you got questions go ahead and drop them below you got ideas about how you're using them share those as well we can all get better with the tools together and until next time my name is scott davenport have fun you

Channel: Scott Davenport

Views: 1,271

Keywords: scott davenport, photography, tips and tricks, tutorial, education, photo editing, landscape photography

Id: Udhst9EqUzU

Length: 12min 43sec (763 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 30 2021