Unmask the secrets to Lightroom masking

Do you get confused with Lightroom's masking tools? Find out how and when to use this powerful feature.

Do you get confused with Lightroom's masking tools? Stick around to get to know how and when to use this powerful feature.

Hi, my name is Rich Dyson from Edinburgh Photography Workshop, and this is Coffee Break Photography.

I've been a Lightroom advocate for well over a decade. My Switch to Manual workshop which I run for beginner photographers visiting Edinburgh, always concludes with a half hour session on getting started with this great editing tool. And because I've used it for so long I've seen the huge improvements that Adobe has made to Lightroom over the years, one of which is the masking tool. However when I'm running my more advanced courses it's pretty obvious that a lot of photographers get quite confused with the masking options. So in the next half hour I'm going to show you the basics of masking and the circumstances each tool are best used in. Make sure you stick to the end of the video because I'll share a simple way to speed up your editing process with the help of masks.

Well, let's jump right into Lightroom, and to use the masking features, we need to go into the Develop module, and we need to click on this little icon here, a circle with dotted lines around it that's filled in. Click on the tool, and we have different types of masks. I'm going to go to this first picture here, which is a performer at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, just back in August, and I'm going to use the first of the tools, which is the subject mask.

So, you can see there are different types of masking which we'll talk through. It looks like there's only three, because there's these three in boxes, but these ones below are also tools that we can use and I'll show you how we can use some of these tools as we go through there today's video.

So, if I click on the subject, you can see that Lightroom goes away and it's correctly identified the person as the subject in this image, instead of here. It's always good to have this Show Overlay box ticked. You can see if it's removed, we don't see where the mask is. Clicking on the Show Overlay box brings the mask in. And if you want to change the colors, we can change the colors anywhere in here and we can increase how opaque or not the mask is going to be on top of the image. I like to keep it in the default color of red and I like to keep the opacity about 50%, because it's good for working on the image and also seeing what's below the mask. And now if I change any one of these sliders inside of here, so for instance if I increase the exposure, that increases the exposure but only in the part of the image which is relating to the mask. So, if I increase or decrease the shadows and really bring in her out of the image just by changing one or two sliders.

So that's a great use of the subject mask. The subject mask works not only with people, it also works with buildings or inanimate object. So here's a really interesting building that we have just on the banks of the River Forth down in a place called Leith just outside of Edinburgh and it's a vertical distillery. So, if I click on Subject, you can see it's done a really good job of the selection of the building itself. And again, just by moving the sliders, I can just open up the exposure, open up the shadows and it's just relating to the building elements, not to this nice blue sky that we had back in, I think in August when this picture was taken, September actually.

So, you can see masking works really well on buildings. Let's look at inanimate object masking. And here's a product shot I took whilst I was working at an event. and these really nice Lind and Lime gin bottles, really ornate side of here. So let's click on subject and you can see it does a fantastic job. So it's not only selected the bottles, it's also identified the reflections of the bottles down here as being part of the selection. So if I increase exposure on there, we can really make these images stand out. I'm gonna just increase the clarity inside of here. So I'm getting a lot more detail inside of those bottles. So, you can see we've done a real improvement to the image with just a few little changes by using masks.

Now, I hope you know that I like to be honest, and masking isn't always the best option or doesn't always work as well as it could do. So, this image is taken on a particularly grey day at the fourth bridges in a place called South Queensferry, again, just outside of Edinburgh. So if I click on subject, we would expect it to select this bridge here and also this bridge here. So let's click on it and see what Lightroom does. So you can see the selection isn't as good as it could be. As well as selecting the bridges, it's also selected the land on the other side of the bridge. You can see it's selected some of the sky, the oil tanker that's in the middle of the Forth, and even some elements of the sky inside the bridges. So it's not done a great job. But I'll show you in another image how we can refine a selection by adding in different types of masking into here.

So that's the first of the masks we want to look at, the subject mask. Let's now look at, we'll go back to this first image. I will look at a different mask and because we've already created a mask on this one, to add a new mask to here, we click on this button that says create new mask. And this time we're going to mask the sky. So it's gone away and it's done again, another really good selection of the sky. And this time what I'm going to do is to make those cloud details which were captured inside of the RAW file, I'm going to make those come out. And you can see we now get a really nice looking angry sky that really offsets against the subjects, you know, nice colorful subjects inside of here. And you can see we've got the woman named as mask one, the sky named as mask two. That can be quite complicated if we start adding more and more masks. So let's right click on the mask and we'll take the option rename. And now we can just add a more sensible name to each of the masks. So again, right click on this one and we'll call that the sky. And if we want to make different changes, we can go back into each one of the masks and we can change just the element that's there, come back into the sky, maybe just add a bit more contrast into that sky just to make it look really, really powerful. And you can see by just those two images, we've got a really nice selection that's given us quite an impressive result from the original image which was there to there.

Okay so let's look at the third of those boxed masks which is the background. So, I've got these again three more performers from the Edinburgh Festival. I'll click on background and it's gone way and it's trying to detect the background and I can make the subject stand out a little bit more by reducing the exposure slider. When I do that you can see the problem with the background selection is that it's not selected this element in here and if I click on the show overlay you can see that clearly it's not selected this bit of wall and it's not selected that bit of wall there either.

So, what we're going to do is we're going to use a different type of mask in here and I'll just click on the the mask button, and you can see we have these two buttons below which say add and subtract so I'm going to click on the add button. And this time we're going to add a color range mask. So what color range mask does is it allows you to use this pen dropper tool to click on an area. And it's then going to select colors which are in that similar type of color range. And I can make it more or less intense by bringing down the amount slider. That's going to make it more intense and less intense instead of there. And if I just add the overlay you can see the effect that's having. So I want to make sure that what I do is going to affect the entire wall area. And you can see that's been selected. But the problem we've got now is that it's also selected the three subjects, you know, which are the things I want to stand out from the image.

So, I'm going to use the subtract button this time. So let's subtract the subject. So it's gone away and it's selected the subject, it's done a really good job. But it's also now include in those areas that it excluded from the background as a subject. So that's not worked as well as we want it to do. So I'm going to put in these little three ellipses and we'll delete that subject all have a different way of subtracting. So again, click on the subtract button and we're going to use this time the option select people. So it goes away and it detects these three people here. So I'm going to click on the person one which I hover over. You can see it does a pretty good selection of that person. There and it comes up with an option entire person. Now I'm going to show you a bit later on some of these other options down here. But for now, we'll leave it selected to the entire person. I'm going to also add the other two people. So click on the add people button, click on person two and person three and continue. So again, it's selecting the entire person for all three of these. I'm going to click on create mask.

Okay, so you can now see that we've selected these three people and the area which is now part of the mask, which is where we're going to make changes to, exclude those three people. So as we make changes to the image, we're now just removing the, or changing the background, including all the areas which were not selected in there. So, a good way of combining different types of masks into one mask, which then allows us total control over the entire image.

So, let's go to this people mask. And here's a picture of Judy Murray. She's the mother of Andy Murray, the tennis player, a well-known person in Scotland. Really nice to photograph. Yes, she's a really happy, cheery person. So we're going to, again, select the person mask. And you see it's done a great job of selecting Judy.

Now, this is where we're going to use these other options down here. And as I hover over each one, you can see the different areas which it's going to select. So there's the lips. There's Judy's teeth, the hair. clothes and it does a great job of identifying each of those options. Now Judy's a little bit older than she used to be so what I'm going to do is help her out by clicking on the facial skin and body skin options. I'm going to uncheck that box for now. We're going to click on create mask. What this is going to do now is create a mask with both of the face and a body inside of here. I'm going to cut the years off so we're going to come down to the texture slider. Just slide it down and there we go. We probably now have Andy Murray's sister rather than his mother inside of there. A nice smooth face inside of here.

Another good way of making a portrait pop is by helping to lift the eyes and maybe in this case Judy's lips which are just getting lost a little bit inside of her face. So we're going to create a new mask and this time I'm going to go again select people when it's identified Judy already. This time I'm going to select the iris and the pupil so that's the middle of the eye and we're going to select the lips and this time we're going to make sure that button creates two separate masks. Just ticked click on create mask and now you can see we've got mask 2 which is the iris and rename that one to say lips. And now if I click on the iris thing I'm going to just increase exposure a little bit. I'm going to make her eyes a little bit bluer by just changing the color temperature. And we get a really nice effect of some eyes that are certainly popping inside of the image. We can then move to the lips mask and I'm going to come down to saturation. I'm just going to make the lips stand out a bit by increasing the saturation ever so slightly. Now one of the issues that you'll sometimes see with people using masking is that they sometimes go a little bit over the top you can see if I whizz this 100% it looks totally unnatural so I was trying to be a little bit subtle with how you use masking. I'm probably going to take it to around about 20 and that's really helped to lift Judy Murray.

Okay so that's the person mask or the people mask so let's look at this image for a nice landscape shot that I did on one of my private workshops over in Glencoe and I'm going to use the landscape mask so you see if I click on landscape Lightroom goes away and it detects different elements of the landscape inside of here. You see it's taking a few seconds as it goes away and works this out. It's identified the sky and it's done a pretty good job of the sky. When you use the mountains option you can see it so hover over the overlay you can see it selected the mountain but it's also selected these trees here which isn't necessarily what I want to work with. It's done a great selection of the water. Artificial ground it's using the the wood in the foreground and natural ground identifies anything which it thinks is land inside of here. So let's click on water and create a mask and we can make some changes just to make the water a little bit darker just to make that reflection stand out a little bit more. I'm going to cool it down a little bit as well so that water becomes really blue inside of there yeah so that's quite a nice change.

We've seen that the mountain version isn't particularly good so what I'm going to do, if I wanted to select the mountain and maybe make that a bit brighter a bit darker is to create a new mask and this time I'm going to use the option brush. So if I click on the brush option you can see we've now got a little cursor it's probably easier if I go into that bit of water. If you want to make the cursor bigger use the right square bracket make it smaller the left square bracket. So I'm going to zoom into the image by clicking on the navigator up here and highlighting the mountain. With the brush selected now I can now paint over the mountain you can see that the mask starts getting out into the mountain. You can see even though I'm going just over the edge, Lightroom is using an edge detection which is making sure that we detect the edge of the mountain and it gives us really sharp selections out of there. Now it's probably not going to do as good a job on the trees down here yeah so I'll just give us that little bit of masking over there, just make the brush a little bit smaller so I can complete the mountain there. I'm fairly happy with that but you can see there are elements of the trees which have been included in here. Click on the option key if you're a Mac user or the alt key as a Windows user. And then you can paint back in. It's going to use the detection tools built into the edge detection. So just identify those trees a little bit better. We can make sure we get all the trees back inside of here. So I'm going to do a fairly quick job. I don't want you to spend all of this video watching me edit out different bits of the trees inside of here.

And then we can then make the tree lighter or darker. Give it a little bit more punch by maybe increasing the the dehaze element inside of here. And then when we zoom out we can see it's made a nice change into that image.

I'd love to see your results of using these powerful masking tools. Have a go and add a link to your photos in the comments section below. Show us your before and after pictures. While you're doing that, don't forget to subscribe to the channel and give this video a thumbs up.

So, to the next type of mask. I've got this nice little picture of two geese walking down an passage way when I was out on a walk one day. And if I use the subject masking, we know that it's going to select the front geese, the front goose, sorry, and the second goose as the subject, which I don't want to happen. I want to make changes just to this front goose here. So what I'm going to do, instead of taking the subject mask, is we're going to take the object mask. And you can see we've got a big square again, square brackets to make it bigger and smaller. And if I paint over the image, you can see it's got this pretty horrible red block inside of here. So I'm just going to cover the entire area where our front goose is. OK. Now Lightroom is going to go and look at this image and select in that area, where does it think the object is? And you can see it's done a really good job of selecting just the front goose while leaving the back goose behind. So I can now just bring out that front goose, give it a bit more exposure. Let's do it again right there. Dehaze it a little bit, just to get a bit more punch inside of that image. And we have  now affected just one part of the image inside of here.

So we've got two more masks to look at. The first one is what we call the linear gradient mask. So this is almost a subject or a replacement for the graduated filter. I've got this picture taken looking over the Edinburgh skyline. And I'll just click on the linear gradient. What you then need to do is to just drag on the image from the top. And essentially it's going to create a mask, which is going to be darker at the top of the image coming down to lighter until eventually going to nothing. Now there's a few controls that we've got that we can use. We've got this little black square. If we click on the black square and move it around we can change where the the center point of the mask is going to be. We've got this little red button up here which means we can make it bigger so the center point changes. We've got the bottom one we can make it smaller and if we wanted to affect say this line going down here we can then use the fourth button down here and just tilt it, so it meets the shape of where we want the gradient to be added.

Okay now if we change exposure inside of here you can see it does a great job of making those clouds a little bit more detailed inside of there giving us a bit more blueness inside of there. I don't want the buildings to be part of that mask. I want the buildings to be remaining the same. So we can, again, go to the mask. We'll just open up, click on Subtract, go to Landscape. So again, just checking all those landscape features. And this time, we can tell it to avoid the architecture. And I'm actually going to also exclude these trees, which are inside of there, which are included in the vegetation part. And now that mask is just affecting the elements of the sky inside of here.

If I wanted to also include or do some changes to anything except for the area we've done the mask, then go to the three ellipses, click on there. And we're going to use this option, which is Duplicate and Invert Mask. So it's now created an inversion of there. And you can see it's done a good selection of anything except the sky. And if we now open up the shadows inside of here, we can bring a little bit more detail into the gardens and maybe make the exposure a little brighter. So we've gone from the original image, which is there, to something like this, so something really powerful. So that's the linear gradient tool.

Let's look at the final one, which is the radial gradient tool. So as you can imagine, instead of it being a line, this is a circle. So if you select the tool, and then we just click and drag onto the picture, and we can create a circle mask. Again, there's controls, so the center one moves it around. So I'm going to put it in the middle of this subject of here. I can use the outer lines to change the shape of it. That way, we can change the shape of it horizontally. And then this line in the middle allows us to change how much it's going to feather the effect. So I want to feather it to maybe there. So I'm going to get the effect. happening inside of there and then graduating out until there's nothing around the circle. So if we make any changes now there's going to change to the subject which isn't what I particularly want to do in this particular image. What I want to do is to actually create a vignette, a more controlled vignette than we get in the effects option.

So, I'm going to click on the ellipsis again. This time I'm going to just say duplicate the mask. Sorry that's the wrong option. I'm going to delete that one. I'm going to say invert mask one. So I've now got the mask which is selecting inside of here and now I can change the exposure. Change exposure in the mask and you can see it's now darkening down the area but keeping the center of the image exactly as we had it before. But the mask is now applied, really nice, much more natural vignette than we would normally get inside of the effects process in there.

So that's masking, that's the different options of masking. You can see all the different use cases and it can really improve images inside of there. But one of the great features of masking is that they use AI to select the different areas and we can then make our editing process a lot quicker.

So, let's look at this image I took from Carlton Hill, it was at the start of one of my Night Photography workshops. I didn't have my filters with me for this particular day. So I exposed for the sky element here. What I want to do, I'm going to create a mask and we're going to select the sky. I'm going to make the sky maybe a little bit darker just to give it a bit more punch, warm up the image, you know, to give it a really fiery sky type element to it. So that's great, you know, a nice change of that sky and it's given us a fantastic burning sunset. I'm now going to duplicate and invert the mask because I want to bring out some more detail down here inside of the the city of Edinburgh and just open the exposure up, open the shadows up. I was starting to see the city in a little bit more detail, all contained within the raw file, so that's where I can get all this information out of here.

So that's quite a nice, very quick edit. We've got this great sky with a view over the city. So to what I want to do, I've got some other images which we've got slightly different compositions for. I want to apply those same settings to these two images, so I'm going to come over to the presets, and we'll create a preset. I'm going to call it the fiery sky mask. And we're just going to select the masking option over here and click on create.

So now we've got this fiery sky mask. I can then come to the second image we've got here, click on the fiery sky mask. And Lightroom is going away and it's identifying the mask. So it's not doing a straight conversion of where the mask was in the previous one. If I hover over here and show you the overlay, you can see it's changed where the mask has been selected and selected the actual sky. And the same for the buildings in there. It's changed where it's done that. And finally, click on the fiery sky mask again with a different composition again. It's done the same changes to it.

I think you can tell that the masking tools are a fantastic way to apply targeted tweaks to your photos. Have a go with your shots or let me know what works for you. If you found an innovative way of using masks to improve your shots, add your method in the comments below.

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My name's Rich Dyson from Edinburgh Photography Workshop and this has been Coffee Break Photography. See you next time.