New Landscape Mask in Adobe Lightroom - I'm not impressed!

Adobe has just updated Lightroom with another Masking feature. This time our landscape photography editing could be improved

Adobe has just updated Lightroom with another masking feature. This time our landscape photography editing could be improved.

Hi, my name's Richard Dyson from Edinburgh Photography Workshop and this is Coffee Break Photography. I'm pretty confident that this video will get comments about Adobe ripping off users with its subscription model. It's likely the ones who've got this far in before making the comments. So for those of you who are still here and watching, let me be honest.

I'm happy with the subscriptions as long as they deliver regular updates that are useful. Every six months or so we get new functionality all included in our monthly or annual subscription. We've just had the latest update to Lightroom and there's the usual updates to newly released cameras and lenses. There's also a few enhancements and changes, but the biggest change is a new masking feature.

You might be familiar with the mask functionality that uses AI to identify things like subjects, sky or backgrounds. And you can also select a person and within that selection masking elements such as facial skin, teeth or eyes. With these various masks you can then apply specific changes to those areas. Great for helping to make eye colours pop and for smoothing skin.

With the latest release we now have a whole new set of masks and this time it's targeted landscape photos. To use the mask we click on the masking tool in the develop module and then take the new option landscape. AI examines the image and identifies various features in a landscape photo that can be masked. If the feature isn't in the photo then it won't be shown as an option.

The full list of elements available are sky, mountains, architecture, vegetation, water, artificial ground and natural ground.

If you haven't used masks before then let’s have a look at Lightroom and let's show you how we can use these masks to improve our photos.

Okay, so here we are inside of Lightroom's develop module. And we've got a few images in this catalog which we're going to use some of the new editing tools for the masking using the Lightroom functionality. So I've put the full the pictures in as if they are totally unedited, there's been no changes applied to any of these images. And each one of them has got certain aspects which we're going to use as part of the masking process. So to go to the masking process we click on this button at the top.

Click on the button and we now get various masks that we can apply and the new one that we've got added is the landscape mask. So we click on the landscape mask. And Lightroom's now going to go away and it's going to examine this picture to identify what elements for masks can be included. And you can see this one has picked sky, architecture, vegetation, water and artificial ground. And you can hover over each of these elements and you can see which area is going to be um identified as a mask.

So the sky, you can see the pink area is identified as sky and it's done a pretty good job. Architecture, anything that's stone seems to be included as architecture. Vegetation should be anything green and you can see it's also picked up all those trees as well. Water, it's picked up that little bit of water that's in the left hand side of the image and artificial ground all the stonework that we've got inside of there.

Now you can select each individual mask option and then apply that as a mask by clicking on create mask. If you do that, as you can see, it adds it and it calls it mask one up here. I'm just going to remove that mask by left clicking on the image and delete mask.

And instead we'll go back to landscape. Once it's done this once it identifies them all. A really good way of adding all the masks is to select each of the mask options individually. And you can see we've now got the tick box saying create five separate masks. When we click on the five separate masks we get a label for each one to tell us what element we're editing.

So if I edit the sky mask anything I do now is on these sliders over here is only going to be applied to the areas in the mask. So if I reduce the exposure we can bring back some detail into the sky. We could add some highlights into here. We could change the temperature so we make the sky look a little bit bluer instead of there. And similarly we can go to vegetation. I want to really punch vegetation and make that a little bit greener. So let's move the exposure slider up. Again I'm going to warm the vegetation up this time. And let's just increase the saturation on there.

Now this image is going to show one of the issues that I think we have with these new masks. And to do that I'm going to just zoom into the picture by clicking on the 100% value here. And then moving over you can see. So when the mask has been created we've got these white lines here and the mask isn't sufficiently good at the moment to be able to identify just the trees here. So it's identifying the trees and a little bit of the sky behind it.

So as we start making our edits you can see that it only applies those edits to both the white area as well as to the the tree area.It probably shows up more if you do it on the exposure. Yeah we're not editing just the vegetation. So this is a little problem I find with this mask the first time I'm using it.

It works quite well and you can see if I click on the architecture one it's doing a pretty good job although even with the architecture one you can see these little holes inside these elements of the design. Inside the holes are being picked up as architecture rather than being picked up as sky. And you can also see over here the tops of this stairwell are also not being picked up by the guide. I don't think this is particularly good at the moment in terms of complicated scenes like this.

Let's get a more simple image. Yeah something like this one - it's taken on the Arthur's Seat which is a hill inside of Edinburgh. So again we're going to apply the mask to it. Apply landscape. It's going to go away, it's going to identify the features inside of here and this time we've just got sky. Does a pretty good job. We've got architecture and again you can see it's not identified all the architecture. If you if we look over here at the national monument and the Nelson monument which is being renovated at the moment it's not identified those as buildings or also buildings over here. So again we've not got a massively good way of masking each these individual options particularly when it's small areas.

So I'm going to create these individual masks. And you can see that in all cases we've not got a mask for these people. Yeah so the people have been correctly excluded. So if I'm clicking on vegetation for instance yeah I can increase exposure of the vegetation.  I'm going to warm up the shot inside of there. In the sky I'm going to use the temperature to bring the sky a little bit bluer. Maybe we'll do the exposure a little bit.

Yeah so we're getting some nice effects and it's relatively small the architecture changes here. So we we're getting something which is fairly reasonable sort of here. Let's get a different image and let's see if there's a any better way. So this is a bit more of a simple image. Uh we've still got some vegetation which is going to be overlapping with the sky so I'm envisaging we're going to see the same issue there as well.

Click on landscape to detect the area and it's identified some sky and it's done a a better job I think this time. We've got some architecture and it's done a pretty good job of architecture. It's doing a pretty good job of identifying the vegetation even the stuff inside of here. You can see that's been picked up as well. Artificial ground is having a good job done of it and natural ground is picking any of the the grass but again it's missing if I show you here it's missing some of the elements over here. It's kind of confusing grass with the tree that's above it. So so this feels to me like Adobe's identified a a thing that they want to do.

And it feels like they've not done a great job yet in using AI to identify the elements of the image which actually are the masking options that they want to do.

I could show it more in this image here. This is the modern art gallery in Edinburgh. And we've got this landform by a landform artist called Charles Jencks who's unfortunately passed away now. But he's got these amazing features that he's got in a number of areas around Scotland and around the world. Click on landscape and it's going to go away again check all those landscape options. And you can see it's identified five areas. The water it's done an okay job but again it's missed if I click on the water it's missed the water here. It's missed the water in these elements. Yeah so it's everything about it is telling me it's not done a great job yet of identifying these areas. Vegetation it's done a pretty good job although again there's elements around just the edge of the water which haven't been identified as vegetation. And an issue that this gives me is that if we start making edits to these these areas are going to look unusual as we start editing and it's not going to work as well as it could do. Architecture again it's not doing a great job. If I zoom in now to this element of the picture. You can see some of the buildings yeah the chimney pots here that part of the chimney pot isn't being picked up as architecture.

Look at the sky it does a pretty good job again but again anywhere where you've got the sky behind certain elements so inside of here you can see in blue it's not picking up that element of the sky.There's a gap in here and there's also a gap if I go over to the very left hand side I can see inside of these trees we're going to get no masking elements in there. So any anything we apply to change this image and if I go through all these and create the mask.

And then look at the full picture. If I'm adjusting the sky - just going to maybe increase exposure take some of the blue sky elements down. And you can see these parts here are still remaining underexposed and not as blue because we've not been able to apply those same changes. So similar for the water so apply over the water I want to make that blue.

And it's making these elements of the water blue but it's not making any of these blue because those weren't selected inside of the mask. I’ll make it a bit brighter. Vegetation you can see it's done a good job except for those elements in the on the edge. And as we do that you can see how it's now making a difference you know that the edge of the the grass is remaining dark as I've tried to bring out some of the the greenery and make it brighter. And it also has the effect that over here again so if I click on 100% and zoom into that element of the image you can see again the masking around the vegetation just doesn't look natural at all.

So very very quick demo of how we're using masks and hopefully showing you how I think these masks aren't working as well as I would like to see them working and as well as they do in terms of using the people mask or some of the other masks that we've got already built into Lightroom. So I can understand the rationale for Adobe adding the landscape masks as a feature but unfortunately I think the actual delivery isn't yet up to the usual high standards we normally see from them

I'm sure that over time there will be enhancements to improve the AI processing. But as it is I can only see this being used for images that have clearly defined elements.

Well if you've enjoyed this video it would be great if you'd like it and share it by clicking on the thumbs up button below the video. That way a few more people will get to see it. You can also subscribe to the channel by clicking on this button here. I send out a monthly newsletter to my subscribers with news about photography as well as some exclusive offers. Scan this QR code to sign up. My name is Richard Dyson from Edinburgh Photography Workshop and this has been Coffee Break Photography.

See you next time.