New Subject Masking for Lightroom and Camera Raw v14

hey everyone welcome to wildlife inspired i'm your host scott keys today a quick software review on the updates or upgrades made to camera raw and lightroom i'm going to apply it specifically to what i do with wildlife photography or bird photography but i just want to do a real quick summary of some of these changes and hopefully you'll find this interesting and i'll show you where to find those changes and which ones i have found to be the most helpful in just a minute [Music] so recently uh adobe made some changes and upgrades updates to their software and they did it for photoshop they did it for bridge and they did it for lightroom and camera raw now this is october 2021 it's kind of hot off the presses if you're watching this i've played with it for just a day and there was one feature that i found really useful for me as a wildlife photographer and i wanted to point that out and show you a little bit of the differences in the interface how it looks and how it behaves and hopefully you'll take something away from it so without any further ado let me pull up the new interface and i'll show you a couple of subtle changes now you're looking at cam the camera raw interface this is what i use the most um [Music] the the engine behind lightroom's develop mode in adobe camera raw editor it's the same thing so if you if you go back and forth the interfaces look almost identical and the features are the same and the engine is identical so i'm going to show you in camera raw what the where these changes are i want to bring your attention if you're used to using uh camera raw on the right-hand side you're going to notice a couple things are actually missing now so the brush tool is gone the gradient tool is gone i think they might call it the graduated filter and then the um the radial filter is gone now they're still there they're just in a different place and what the focus has been on with this upgrade is really around the ability to create masks easier and so this button right here i'll hover over it and it should bring up let me see if i can bring up the little masking information for you uh it may not okay it doesn't look like it's gonna pull it up but that little button it's a third button down is the new mask feature and when you click on that what you're going to see now underneath it is brush linear gradient and radial gradient so those are new they're not new they're in a new position in the menu so this is where you're going to find them now and i was kind of curious there's a new feature called select subject i was kind of curious how well does this work so i took an image that i was working on i'm going to show you this with two and we're going to see how well it does now this one it actually did it's one click it'll you know do a little math run a little algorithm try to determine the subject and there it is it did include in this case uh some of these little berries below it but the edges were really i was actually surprised how well it found these edges and when i zoomed in i could really tell that it did a pretty good job on it so a really nice job now it did select a couple areas that i didn't want it to and right here you're going to see it created a new line for subject and that is right there i'll click on it that is what is highlighted now i can create multiple subjects so i could add or i could subtract so if it picked an area i didn't want i could subtract that area away so you could see right down in here i can pick how i want that to take it away so i'm going to choose the brush and i'm simply going to brush away this area up here that got selected and then i'm going to change my brush size a little bit and i'm also going to highlight down here and it's removing those you can see it's in red it's removing those areas as i brush them out so i'm just going to brush those areas out pretty easy so far so now i've created the brush and i've got my original subject down here so pretty neat now i can create new ones i can i can make a new mask so i can leave that mask number one and i can click up here and create a new mask and i could now let's say select the sky or i could use one of the previous tools like the brush the linear gradient or the radial gradient i think they renamed the linear gradient i thought that used to be called graduated filter but i could be wrong on that okay so pretty easy to see how this could be helpful if i've created a really great selection and what i look for when i make these adjustments are things called halos i hate halos i think it's a pretty easy sign to see when you've done editing that isn't isn't well done you'll see these halos around subjects so if i increase the exposure what i'm looking for is how well did that mask work and am i getting any halos and i'm not really seeing any maybe a little tiny bit right off the top but only when i really increase the exposure so all of a sudden i can dial in exposure on my subject i don't have to paint it in maybe with a brush like i may have used to do and i can adjust anything i could also go and rather than just to adjust things like exposure and contrast and shadows i could come up here or down here to where it says sharpness and i could apply sharpening and if again if that mask is is accurate it's just going to apply sharpening to the subject and not the background which is what i would want so pretty helpful now i'm going to close this one down i'm going to show you one more since i'm trying to do this quick and really just focus on those major changes i'm going to pull up one that's going to be a little bit tougher so this is a sparrow that i shot this morning a white throated sparrow and i thought wow this one's going to be a little tougher so this is in bridge right now and i'm just going to go ahead and open it and when it opens it into photoshop it's going to start and you can program this or set this up how you want to but it opens for me directly into camera raw because this is how i'm this is my workflow i start in bridge i go to camera raw now on this one i'm going to try the same thing so i'm going to select the mask and i'm just going to see if it does it automatically and how well it does it and the reason i think this one's going to be a little trickier is because of the depth of field this one has the bill the head the eye or in focus and then typical of my style of shooting everything else is out of focus so i was curious what it would do and it's thinking there it goes now it has to end somewhere right and it did an amazingly good job look at the look at how refined this is on the edges like really really impressive the bills are pretty easy but when you get into areas up here they become a little bit more difficult and it does a really great job so i'm going to go ahead and make some adjustments and oh by the way this mask up here uh this will this box you can uh let me see i believe you can unlock this as well i'm gonna hide the eye there we go so you can drag this there we go you can drag this anywhere that you want or you can lock it up so i'm going to lock it there i can check this on and off so it's showing me the overlay if i want to get rid of that i can uncheck that also as a shortcut the y button will toggle that on and off so you can just hit the y on the keyboard to toggle that on and off and i am going to make some adjustments so i know my mask is selected and i'm going to start making some adjustments now with this one because it's got this a little bit of these out of focus foreground elements probably bleeding onto the bird you can notice it's a little bit washed out so i'm going to use a couple tricks in here to bring that out i'm going to pull up the exposure just a hair but i'm going to get into contrast and then whites and blacks i'm going to pull these whites up i'm going to pull these blacks down but i'm going to do a little bit more of that down here where it says texture and clarity so you'll see as i start to introduce these that bird is going to get more contrast i'm going pretty aggressive with these sliders dehaze is a really aggressive slider but in applications where there's some of this haze or film over the subject it works really really well it's one of my favorite little tips to give to people on my patreon account by the way i've covered this before and i cover it in a little bit more detail but i'm going to give you a sneak peek of it here and again i'm looking for halos i'm going to go back up to exposure and just play around a little bit more because and you can see me going crazy with it but i want to see how much of a is bleeding over and notice it's really not so it did a really great job and that was a smart selection i just clicked one button to make that mask is it a game changer i don't know if it's a game changer but it's a really great enhancement to camera raw in lightroom i can see myself using this in my workflow where i didn't normally use masks in adobe camera raw i would always do it on the photoshop side i can see an application now just because it's quick and easy so i'll toggle the before and after you can see just with those slight adjustments look how flat the image is the subject you know getting some of that foreground and then just after a couple quick tweaks i mean you talk in a minute 30 seconds to make the mask add some quick adjustments and i've already made a difference now this is far from my final edit i'll actually pause this i'll play around in photoshop i'm going to enhance this a little bit i'll like even do some digital magic and i'll show you uh kind of the final result right after that so i did a few edits now this is the raw file right out of camera no adjustments made to it at all and after editing it i showed you the mask i came up with something like this and by the way if you're interested in how i edit bird photography some of my patrons are probably watching this and they're looking over there saying oh yes i know what he did i see how he does this um but if you're interested in things like in improving your editing or specifically how to take better bird photographs from behind the scenes and in the field but also to the finished editing product i check out my patreon account i do a lot of uh teaching specifically around bird photography when i brought this in with the mask applied let me show you the difference i went from here i cropped it and composed it but you can see it's just and and no other adjustments that's just with the mask applied um and then i built up all a bunch of layers i hit a couple things you could see i moved the background and manipulated a little bit i don't generally alter myself i i don't alter my subjects in photography but because i shoot a lot of tight habitats i will clean up branches and and do things like that so i do these minor touch-ups and i teach all that on my patreon account so hopefully you like the video and hopefully you found that mask tool helpful go ahead and play around with it make sure you update your adobe camera raw in lightroom so that you can take advantage of that new feature and if you have any questions or comments leave them down below as always thanks for tuning in thanks for your support and i hope we can continue to find inspiration and wildlife together you

Channel: Wildlife Inspired w/ Scott Keys

Views: 1,769

Keywords: photography, wildlife, wildlife photography, scott keys, skeysimages, beginner photography, beginner, bird photography, adobe, camera raw, lightroom, masking, update

Id: XE-6kKAnD6c

Length: 11min 18sec (678 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 28 2021