NEW: Lightroom / ACR Masking 2.0

adobe just released some huge news the biggest update to lightroom camera raw in perhaps a decade that is a complete overhaul of local adjustments including much better visualization through actual masks new tools like select sky and the ability to combine multiple masks for much more complex and nuanced results in this video you'll learn all about how to make the most of these new masking tools and how they might impact your raw and photoshop workflow i've already started my edit in lightroom to take it from this original raw to this current state here so just to quickly catch you up to speed i made these changes in the basics panel made a tone curve adjustment some changes to the hsl saturation in the yellows and greens and some boost to the camera calibration saturation sliders to bring up more color in the image overall so it's a nice starting point and ready now to start making local adjustments to the sky where of course we're going to bring out a lot more color and a bit of a glow to the water which looks very dirty and i'd like to clean that up and to these foreground rocks which i'd like to just diminish a little bit and restore the visual flow back to the waterfall and sky before we get to the actual local edits though let's just play and explore the new options to understand them and then we'll put them to use what we need to do is go over this new icon in lightroom and click on it to see the new options and if you're in adobe camera raw you're going to have these same options your interface will just be a little bit different but everything i am doing here is going to apply equally for you now the first thing to note is the brush linear gradient radio gradient all very familiar tools they're still here and they basically work the same way where things start to change a little bit is the range mask that used to be inside them are actually now promoted to their own top level mask so if you want to go and just pick green in the image but all the green not inside of a brush or inside of a gradient you can do that with a color range and you've got luminance where you can do the same thing or you can even combine these options together so you can go pick things that are both green and bright in the image if you want at the same time of course depth has always been there you may not been aware that but that's a pre-existing option if you're working with a smartphone or something that supports it and then lastly we have some new options up top including select subject to go grab people or pets and select sky and if i use one of these two top new options it's a little bit different in that it's going to work with a new standalone catalog file in your computer and it does add a little bit of size because it's going to generate a bitmap so let's click on one of these and see what it does if i click on select sky you're going to see it's going to go detect the sky so it's just trying to find it and now a couple things have happened this new masking panel has appeared at top right and i've got a pin for the mask and notice that the pin is no longer just a little dot it's actually a more intuitive icon that shows me what i'm getting so a sky pin looks like a little landscape image but if i would did a portrait pin then it would look like a headshot so it just gives you a little better indicator what kind of a mask you're working with and this masking panel is going to be really helpful as we start to make more advanced edits and things grow but just to kind of quickly navigate it the panel itself can be moved around the screen you can minimize it to make it nice and small out of the way you can even double click to go dock it to the right hand side if that's where you want it so a lot of flexibility what i'd like to do is leave it up in the top right here minimize the histogram and i can see all my tools here so these are the masks which are essentially what i'm adjusting in the image and these are the tools which is how i'm adjusting them what i'm going to do to the sky or to whatever now just like before if we hover over a pin you can get a preview of what's being targeted but notice that this is a very different look we have a different overlay here i love this new look to see things like you would see a layer mask in photoshop of course we don't have layers in lightroom so this is not a layer mask it's just a mask but it just gives you a nice way of seeing what a high quality job is done of selecting the sky you can already tell from looking at this that it's going to do a pretty good job you can also get that preview by hovering over its icon and we've got two icons here because when you combine things if we start to add subtract intersect we can have multiple mass here i could go and intersect this with like the blue color of the sky and then there'd be a blue little component here so these components add up to this mask so it's just the same when there's one but as we get more complicated you'll see how that works of course we have some options and you can find them down in the bottom here so if you want to go back to color overlay this would show you the familiar old ruby lith overlay and there are several different options but i think most of you are going to want to work with either the color overlay which lets you see both mask and image or white on black which gives you this look as if you're working with a layer mask so really enjoy that we'll explore some of these options as we get into it but let's start to use this and see how this works so now that i've got my mask on the image i need to go do something to it all my sliders are unadjusted and i can go and just for example grab the exposure slider drag that down and notice that it's just working on the sky and if i make an extreme adjustment okay yeah there's some problems here it's not a perfect mask if i was working with luminosity masks i could be more precise this is not meant to replace advanced masking in photoshop this is going to give you an ability to create really good masks in lightroom or adobe camera and what's cool about it is if we just go to more subtle adjustments maybe just move like a stop or two that's perfectly fine that's a great looking mask you can zoom in pretty darn close and i don't feel like that's a deficient mask i'm pretty happy with the results there until you get to a couple stops now it's starting to fall apart but you can do quite a bit with this and you know your results will vary depending on your particular image but i think there's quite a lot to love about this new sky selection now what if we want to go and do something a little bit more complicated to it i mentioned we can combine things so what if we say well great i i want this sky selection but maybe just in the blue tones over here well i can go and combine it with other masks one thing that's maybe a little confusing here is the masking icon if i go click this again i'm just showing and hiding these tools now so it's a little bit strange because the masking options no longer show here they're now embedded in this panel so once you have a mask this is where you have to go to go modify things and there's two ways to to work i can click on a mask and then add subtract to work with it or if i hold down the option key it'll show me intersect okay there's hidden cool options there and we'll get to that in a moment but i can modify this mask or i could create a totally new mask by just clicking on create new mask in this case if i want to go work on the sky well then i already have a sky selection i want to go and combine it with something if i want to work with the blue in the sky if i were to go click on add then it's going to take what i already have and add anything else that's blue in the image and maybe this little piece of rock might qualify if i said subtract it would remove the blue from the sky but if i want the blue in the sky then what i want to do is intersect it and so i could hold down alt or option click on intersect and now choose what to intersect with so i'm going to say color range and now i can click on the color in the blue sky and now i've picked that up and we have the same options here we can go and refine this like we did before so notice that the mask is showing here but the mask options appear above the adjustments but we've already removed this from here and if i hover you can see these are the blue things of course there was a lot of blue down here in the foam so that got picked up but it's not going to affect the mass because we're going to subtract this from the sky so when we take this guy and subtract this we get this combined result it's taking that blue out of the sky notice the difference between the subtracted mask and the full mask so this has got white everywhere in the original mask and then afterwards we pulled out those things that are blue so now if we start playing with our exposure now we're working on a different portion of the sky you can do these much more advanced cool things and we could keep building on these same concepts let's say now that i'm going to go and expand this so i don't know maybe i want to go and add the bottom of the image for no particular reason i can so say add go grab a linear gradient let's do that and drag it up and now that's been added to this as well and you see when i hover it you show it that's what's going to be added and the combined mask is all of these things so it's the sky minus the color range plus the linear gradient and that's the way this works it works from bottom up so we take this thing then we combine with this thing if it says minus we subtract it if it doesn't show an icon that it's an add and that's what we have up here that's an ad now intersect is a little weird intersect does not have its own icon it's actually not its own thing when i chose to intersect this notice it's got a minus what happened to is it's going to take this and subtract the inverted version of it whether i intersect something or subtract its opposite i get to the same result and that's just the way that adobe has chosen to represent this if you're on like a mobile platform and things like that you don't even have an option to intersect it's really more just certain versions like lightroom classic here that have this i personally find the idea of intersecting more intuitive because i'm thinking about something which is both sky and blue but it's the same you know kind of approach that we can subtract the opposite so you know the math here would be sky minus the things that are not blue which is all this other stuff so it comes to the same place so a little confusing read the written version of this tutorial if you want more detail on how that all works but i just want to note that little quirk about the intersected masks so that's kind of the rough setup on this thing lastly i do want to note that you've got some options within the components here i can hide particular components so right now if i go and hide the sky here's everything else i can go and hide the color range and get back the rest of the sky and of course it's applying this exposure adjustment through this new mask when i remove the color range i did that if i turn it back on i get here so you can enable or disable certain components in your mask to remove the bottom here if i want or even turn it on or off the entire mask itself so some really powerful tools within this masking panel i think at this point we've done enough exploration let's actually use this thing so i'm going to go back to the beginning which is cleaned out all my masking i don't have any mask applied and let's begin this work so i would just normally go click for a new mask to start the whole thing and let's work with the sky so i'm going to go say select sky so it's going to moment to catch up it's grabbing the sky and at this point i also want to make things grow into the foreground a little bit i don't just want the sky i want a little bit of glow on the trees and all we'll come back to that let's make the adjustments then i'll show you the difference and why these combined selections can be so powerful so i'm thinking for this i want to warm it up a little bit maybe take the temp up to around 25 to get the tint up a little bit to maybe around 15 or so bring down the highlights to maybe minus 30 bring out some more color there i think these areas of the sky are a little bit dark so i want to bring up my shadows to even like maybe plus 60 or so kind of soften and even out the sky a bit there and then to give it a little glow let's go negative dehaze by a little bit here something like minus 15 or so and a little more saturation to something like plus 30. so with that if we go click on the eyeball here we went from before to after to get a much more interesting sky it's done a nice job of applying it to the sky i don't see obvious edges looks really nice but like i said i do want to kind of have things fall over into the foreground i want the glow and to get that glow i need to let the adjustments spill into these trees a little bit so let's expand things let's go and add a radial gradient so i can drag this redo gradient something like this and you see what's happening now is i'm adding it to what i had before and it's expanding on the sky and i think that looks pretty good like that so we had our sky then we added this radial gradient and we got to this mask which gives us this overall result and i think that that is is really pretty you know good in terms of like spilling light over but it's also getting deep into the shadows this does not look very natural to me there's not the kind of haze that would support that so what i want to do now is go and use the luminosity to back things off a bit so if i click on my mask to make it active again i want to go and intersect this i'm going to hold down alt or option to get to the intersect option click on that and let's go down for a luminance range adjustment and then with this what i want to work on are the brightest tones in the sky and the trees so i can start bringing in the bottom of this to be more precise now notice one cool thing about this is luminance range used to have two end points and a smoothness slider now it has two end points and these little feather adjustments so if you want to go and bring in the edges you can control the fall off in the highlights versus the fall of the shadows separately so the luminance range tool is actually more precise than it used to be but let's take this and bring this in to maybe 75 or so and between these brackets this is a hundred percent of this adjustment and then in here is the fall off so i'm at 100 and go all the way down to zero so let's bring this up to maybe like 25 which is now saying no adjustment in the really dark stuff some adjustment until it's a full adjustment and then um i think the rest of that's probably pretty good let's consider this fall off you know i'm going to bring this up even more let's bring this all the way up to the top soften that up a bit so i'm getting that spillover effect a little bit there and just kind of take a look from before after see that's a much more natural glow letting things kind of fill but not blocking up the shadows too much there giving us this overall mask so i think that's a really nice adjustment of the sky and let's go ahead and now work on the waterfall so i need to go and add a new mask and if i click add here i would just be adding another component to this mask what i want to do instead is actually create a new mask so click on this and then i'm going to go with a radial gradient i think that'll be a good choice here and you can see it's showing the starting point it's kind of blank telling me it's new radio gradient with a little warning because i have not yet created it so i got to do is click and drag to create it and now it's populated here and of course i want to move it into position go to the edges and rotate it so it aligns with my water something more like this it's gonna be a nice way of targeting that water so now to adjust that of course i'm thinking that i want to make the you know color temperature much cooler take out some of that yellow in the water maybe like minus 30 even let's push our whites up considerably to around maybe 80 or something like that take our saturation now down to just overall kind of pull that back so that's a much softer look to the water than what i had before and if we take a look at this thing from before to after it's pretty good but it's also spilling over onto things like the rocks and so i wouldn't mind just kind of focusing more on the bright stuff and not letting it fall into the shadows so of course this is going to be another intersection with luminance so go up hold alt option click to intersect and go choose a luminance range at which point we can go and knock out the shadows really bring this up to maybe i don't know something like 75 or so to the highlights maybe even knock off the top so i'm not adjusting the brightest spots as much and that's giving me a little tweak there if we take a look at turning this off we had before to after sorry wrong one i want to go to the luminance when we had just the radio gradient on its own like this and then after we kind of clean that up and just notice things like the water over here just get a little bit cleaner when we're not going and making these rocks blue like that just being a little more isolated to the waterfall itself and i think at this point i can adjust it a little bit further maybe let up a little bit on my temp adjustment and maybe even bring down the saturation just a tiny bit more keep it a little bit more white and less blue there i think that's looking pretty good um there is still a little bit of blue to the rocks there and i don't know if it's coming from this adjustment or not kind of seems like it is so at this point let's maybe clean that up and i'm just going to go and say subtract with a brush and this is getting in the way so we can kind of move this over here and i can just brush on this area to knock that out and make sure that i'm not brushing in that and now let's just take a look and that's kind of cleaned up you can see the brushing that i did over there of course if that's coming in too fast you can slow down the flow and all sorts of other brush adjustments like before to kind of clean things up but i think that's looking pretty good let's then move down to the ground here and i'm going to go and add a linear gradient so i need to go create a new mask go for a linear gradient here of course the same shortcuts apply i could hit m to jump into this tool as well but i think most people can find it more intuitive to just go up and visually click on it like this and then we'll just go click and drag something like this and then i'm going to go and take my highlights here down just a little bit something like -20 or something like that to just take it from before to after to clean that up and i think that's looking pretty good so with that now um you can see we've made a few different adjustments we've made the sky look better we made this waterfall look better and we've got this adjustment here in the foreground mask and that's overall improving things quite a bit and at this point i would say i can just hit escape kind of hit it again to close out of that and move on with whatever i need to do but i do want to note the tools here are going to give you an ability to work more intuitively in lightroom you can push things further in lightroom but at the end of the day i think you're still going to be using a lot of the same workflows when you get into photoshop if you're trying to work with blending multiple exposures this doesn't overcome that we're still working with one exposure or if you're trying to multi-process the same exposure notice for example if i go into my masks and let's go back to our sky let's go and rename this just called sky to make it more clear within this sky these are the range of adjustments that i have available to me i do not have the tone curve hsl camera calibration local ability to control you know say the way that i'm applying uh chromatic aberration reductions none of these tools and i don't have any of the photoshop tools here so i just have these tools so don't get carried away thinking that this just eliminates the need for photoshop it's just giving you a much better lightroom or acr experience and i will cover that much more detail in my blog post related to this and now click on this next video to learn more about how to make the most out of lightroom

Channel: Greg Benz Photography

Views: 21,871

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Id: X_VKWakjur4

Length: 19min 18sec (1158 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 26 2021