Masking in Premiere Pro – How to Easily Get Started

Use the masking and tracking effects from Adobe Premiere Pro. Masking in Premiere Pro will help to create and adjust masks to other effects in Premiere Pro.

Masking in Premiere Pro

In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to get started using the powerful masking and tracking workflow from within Premiere Pro. We’ll be making use of the effects and the effects control panel with an example of Layer Mask all in Premiere Pro. Masks let you define a specific area in a clip that you want to blur over like effects or color correct.

Masking Basics in Premiere Pro

Effects can be applied either inside or outside the mask area. So to start off, we’re going to be using the effects control tab. Now, I have a clip on my timeline here, and the clip is also here in the source window. And if I want to see my effects control tab, I’ll hit shift five. And if you come down here to opacity, you see that you have three tools here.

You have the ability to create an ellipse mask, a four-point polygon mask, or the pen tool. We’re going to start off this example. We actually want to apply an effect, we want to do some color correction and we want the color correction to be mostly in her face. So in the effects panel, and if you don’t see the effects panel, you can hit shift seven.

I searched for lumetri color. I’m going to grab the lumetri color and drop it on my clip. And here in the effects controls, here’s the lumetri color effect. And you have those same options for you’re masking. And whichever method you want to make your masks, you just click on it over in your program window, you have your mask.

These handles you can click to position your mask, make it bigger or smaller. And if at any time I want to delete that mask, I will come over to the lumetri color effect. In this case, Highlight mask one and I hit my delete key, and sometimes the Pen tool is good to use. You can just click and drag your points.

In this case, I’m going to go around her face, and to close the other end you see my point where the pen tool is and there’s a circle. Now click and you can grab any of these points here and pull it in. You click anywhere, you can make a new point, click on a point, you can see these handles right here.

You can move them and make curvature and you can move this in as far as you need to. There is this outer circle right here that you can use for your mask feathering. You see that the lines are moving, that is the feathering. You can also do this in the effects control panel. There’s mask feathering and I can adjust it right here.

You see that the feathering is changing. You can expand the mask by clicking on this solid square right here. You could do it right here in the program window. You see that the solid blue line is the mask expansion. You can also adjust the mask expansion in the effects control panel. Just twirl is down and you could slide in you expanding and contracting the mask.

How to use a Mask to Color Correct and Track a Person’s Face

And so now what I want to do is I want to do a little color correction and I want to add a little bit of red into her face. And because we have our mask, that color correction is only going to be applied within there. So I want to go to the mid-tones and I’m just going to add some red too much.

And I have mask opacity right here. If I want to take that down a little bit, there is the before and there’s the after. So an example of using your masking and targeting an area to do some color correcting. So now we could take this further. If we play the clip, you see that her head is moving and I’m going to stop it but you see what the mask is.

So the mask right now is not tracking the movement of her head. Let’s fix that. So with a clip back at the beginning, I’m going to come up here to where it says Mask Path, and I’m going to click on the toggle animation. And right here there’s an arrow that says track selected mask forward. So we’re going to let Premiere Pro do all our keyframing.

And so this mask is going to track her head movement. So I’m going to click on this arrow and it’s doing its progress. And let’s play this. And there’s where the mask is. So Premiere Pro did all the work for us and you can see here’s all the keyframes that it automatically created for us. And if you click on this wrench right here, if Preview is unchecked, it will go a lot faster.

How to use layer masking in Premiere Pro

In this example here, it’s just a clip of somebody looking out the window and I’m going to show you an example of working with a couple of layers. So I need use the pen tool. And this time we’re not using an effect, I’m going to come down to the opacity tab and you have the same tools on click on the pen tool right here and I’m going to mask out this window.

So I’m going to click make a point and if I hold down my shift key and click, I will get a straight line, hold on my shift key, get another straight line hold down my shift key, and click there’s another point and I’m going to click somewhere here in the middle. Make a little curve and join my point.

Now, in this case, I want to actually cut out the window and have the rest of the clip show. So under mask one, I’m going to click on Inverted. And then I have another clip that I am going to bring over below that clip, the clip that I made, the mask on and so we poked a hole in that top clip and brought in another clip below it and there is a result.

So it’s like she’s looking out a window at the train going by. So that’s an example of using masking in multiple layers.

Check out my photography website here ➡️ https://www.charlescabreraphotography.com

See the previous blog article here ➡️. How to Use the Color Sampler Tool in Photoshop – Easily Exact-Match Colors