How to Use the New and Improved Masking in Lightroom and Adobe Camera Raw

In the improved masking in Lightroom and Adobe Camera Raw, you get the new features Select Sky and Select Subject. The new masking panel has all your masking tools including targeted adjustment tools. You will be able to use the new and improved masking in Lightroom, Lightroom Classic, and Adobe Camera Raw.

Masking in Lightroom and Adobe Camera Raw

In today’s video, I’m going to show you the masking capabilities that’s come to Adobe Camera Raw, Lightroom in Lightroom Classic. I’m going to go through a series of images and show you just how great of an improvement this is for Camera Raw and Lightroom users.

It’s not going to matter if you use Adobe Camera Raw or Lightroom. The interface is going to look the same. So if you’re in Lightroom up here is the masking icon. You can click that or hit “M” on your keyboard.

The Masking Panel Tools

And here’s your new masking panel. In Photoshop, if you come into camera raw and here is that same masking icon right here, click on that. And the interface looks the same. These are all the new masking options that you have when you go into Adobe camera from Photoshop.

And if you go into Adobe Lightroom, which is actually which, you can get a desktop version and you can reach it on mobile. Up here, you see you have the icon or your new masking panel and the options are the same.

So you can get to the new masking in Lightroom Classic, Adobe Camera Raw, and Adobe Lightroom Mobile. So we’re going to use Lightroom Classic. This is the masking icon up here if you click on that. And here are all your masking tools.

Select Subject and select Sky are new. You still have your local adjustment tools, your brush, the gradient and radial gradient. The color range, luminance range, and depth range controls have all been elevated to their own tools, and to the right of these tools are their keyboard shortcuts.

How to Use Color Range

We’re going to start off with a color range. We’re going to change the color of her dress here. If I click on the color range. Here’s my new mask. And with the color change, all you need to do is click with the eyedropper tool.

If I want to sample more areas, I hold shift and click on the area. I believe you can have five samples. And right now, we actually have a mask or a selection, but why you can’t see it is because the overlay color is red and so is her dress.

So here are all these options for the overlay. And in most cases, you’re going to use the options that are already selected by default. But if you wanted to change your overlay color, you can click on the square right here that has a color in it, and you can change it to any color that you want.

I’m going to click on Green and then you can see change the color there. I’m going to stick with red and it can be named my Color Range Mask right here. Just click on it and I can say, dress color.

Now I’m going to come out here to this hue, and I’m going to take it all the way. Say something like that. Not every shade of that red was selected on the dress. But what I can do is come up here to add and I can choose my brush.

You can use your left and right brackets to change the size of your brush. You have your brush options here. You can feather change the flow density and I can use the brush to add to my mask. Again, I use the color range to make my mask.

And then I clicked add and I selected the brush and I used the brush tool to add to my mask. Well, I’m quickly adding in the mask to these areas so that my color range gets all the areas that I wanted, and I can click on this brush and I can say, add mask brush just so I

How to Use Select Subject

kind of know what I did, and I turn off all the mask and turn it back on. You could show the overlay or turn off the overlay. So in this example here, this is kind of an overcast day. I’d like to bring the background down and not affect the subject.

So we’re going to use our select subject might add select subject will not only select people, but also anything in an image that it thinks is the subject it can select animals rocks. Give it a try. Click on select subject.

There’s my selection with the red overlay I can uncheck show overlay if I don’t want to see that. Now what I can do is over here there are three dots and I click on that and here is invert. So now the background is selected. I’ll uncheck show overlay.

And let’s use dehaze and we’ll dehaze a little bit. You see that took that background down. Want to take it further? Take the exposure down. So we inverted the select subject mask. Now we can also make some more targeted adjustments so I can click on this plus here and create a new mask and then use the brush

tool. And this time I’m going to paint on these rocks right here. I think I want to bring up the shadows a little bit on these rocks, maybe a little bit over here, just something like that. And I’m going to rename this brush right here rocks and turn off my overlay.

And now I can bring up my shadows. You can see the shadows coming up on the rocks. And I can add some texture. Some Clarity to the rocks. Those are targeted adjustments that you can make. Here’s all my masks use two masks here, and we use targeted adjustments for the brush.

There’s the before and there’s still after. If you are getting value out of this so far. Hit that like button and consider subscribing.

How to Use Select Sky

Here in this example, I want to use a select sky. I want to bring out some of the details here, and this is going to be a little bit of a challenge because it’s a screen back there and

all these wires. Let’s give it a try. So I’m going to say select sky. There is my sky overlay. And it wasn’t a perfect selection because you could see that it’s selected part of her hair in her face and it turned it red.

We’re going to subtract from this mask and click Subtract, I’m going to come down here to brush. Before I make any changes to the Sky, I’m going to subtract from this mask all the areas that select Sky has affected. So the overlays are on so you can tell that it is removing that mask.

So we’re using a select sky and the brush tool in combination to get this mask. OK, so now we can go to the sky or turn off the overlay and bring down some highlights and dehaze at sky add a little clarity in there, and we can play with the exposure a little bit.

There’s before and there’s the after. So we have a little bit more detail back in the sky and created a new mask. And let’s try a color range here. Click on this blue and can refine it. There’s one end a 100% and refine it, so it just affects a little bit of that sky and turn off

the overlay on that color range, increasing the saturation. So it’s a deeper blue up there. There’s two before and there’s you after. So mainly we’re after the sky. I can create another new mask. This time I can go for the radial gradient and right here we had the sun we can move this here.

Turn off the overlay. And if you think there are too many highlights there, it’s a little bit too bright and toned down. A little bit can change the temperature, make it a little bit warmer back there. So you have all these masks.

And one thing you might want to do is rename things so that you know what’s going on. There’s the before and there’s the after. More selective adjustments.

How to Invert a Mask

Here’s an example probably happens a lot. You’re trying to get a shot of the sky and it’s really bright in your foreground is very dark.

Well, we can use the select sky, turn off our overlay, reduce our highlights, reduce the exposure a little bit, then a bit of clarity. Some dehaze make that sky a little bit more dramatic. And then what do we do about the foreground?

We can create a new mask and we could use a linear gradient. Bring that up, something like this. Turn off the show overlay to add some shadows so we could do something like this or back up to the linear gradient and you click on these three dots right here.

You can delete that particular mask. Let’s delete it. And now let’s create a new mask. And let’s say select Sky. Come here to the three dots and say, Invert take the show, overlay off and we can make our same adjustments.

And I think we have better control this way. We can bring up our shadows and it is a very late afternoon evening shot, so we’re not going to make it too bright. And you can add texture dehaze a little bit, a little bit of clarity.

So that’s another way to deal with a photograph that is very overexposed in the sky in the foreground is underexposed or to bring out that sky, make it nice and dramatic and bring back a little bit of the foreground.

There is the before and there is the after with the new targeted adjustments and masking in Lightroom.

How to Use Color Range and Luminance Range

So let’s use the color range to select these reds up here for the color range is going to give us an average of the colors that we select.

So if I click once or shift and click again, it’s going to select a wide range of colors or turn off my overlay and increase my saturation. So that was a targeted adjustment for my colors using color range.

Let’s add another mask, and this time we’re going to use the luminance range. So luminous range is going to help us with selecting the tones. We’re going to get an average of the tones here my eyedropper or bring out the tones here in these rocks.

The Sun’s hitting it. I think I want to make it a little bit brighter here. So now we’ve got a range of tones selected here. If we come over here to these, this slider over here is going to determine the range of tones.

Further out is how wide the tones are selected. And then this is the feathering here it says lower off. And if you bring that in more and it brings the selection even narrower. Going to turn off the overlay, you never turn up the exposure.

You can see what that does. I want to turn up too much, just a little bit, and turn up the whites just to kind of make that stand out a little bit more because the Sun is hitting it.

See the previous article here ➡️ New Neural Filters in Photoshop 2022 – Harmonization and Landscape Mixer

Checkout my photography website here ➡️ https://www.charlescabreraphotography,.com