- Five Handy Things to Know Right Up Front about Masking
- Editing Your Main Subject
- What to Do If It Doesn't Work Perfectly
- Getting Better Masking Results
- Better Looking Skies, Method 1: Select Sky
- Better Looking Skies, Method 2: Linear Gradient
- Better Looking Skies, Method 3: Masking Objects
- Better Looking Skies, Method 4: Preserving Your Clouds Using a Luminance Mask
- Five Really Helpful Things to Know Now About the Brush Masking Tool
- Painting with Light (Also Known as "Dodging and Burning")
- The Brush's Awesome Auto Mask Feature (How to Not Mask "Outside the Lines")
- Fixing the White Balance in Just One Part of Your Image
- Retouching Portraits
- Selecting People in Group Photos
- Editing Landscape Images
- Editing Your Background
- The Easy Way to Mask Anything (Not Just the Subject)
- Changing the Color of Something in Your Image (Point Color)
- Eight More Masking Things You'll Want to Know
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
The Brush’s Awesome Auto Mask Feature (How to Not Mask “Outside the Lines”)
When you’re masking with the Brush tool, sometimes it’s hard to paint “inside the lines,” so that’s when the Auto Mask feature comes in to save the day. It senses the edges of areas where you’re painting, and even if the edge of your brush extends outside the area, it won’t spill over onto another area (which is pretty amazing) as long as you follow a simple rule that makes it all work (which you’re about to learn).
Step One:
Press the K key on your keyboard to get the Brush tool and start painting over the right side of the dome (don’t move any sliders yet—I want you to see the red-tinted mask). When you paint along the edge of the dome, it’s likely your brush strokes will probably spill over onto the sky (as seen here, where you can see the red tint is going over onto the sky). You can keep that from happening (this spillover) by using the Brush tool’s Auto Mask feature. First, turn it on by just turning on its checkbox at the bottom of the Brush panel (as shown circled here).
TIP: Making Your Brush Faster
Only turn on Auto Mask when you get near the edge of something—not when you’re painting across a large wall or a big sky—because the crazy math it does as you’re painting slows the brush down quite a bit. You can press the A key to toggle it on/off as needed.
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Step Two:
Now, let’s hit Undo (Command-Z [PC: Ctrl: Z]), and try again, but this time with Auto Mask turned on. As you paint, it senses where the edges of things are in your image and keeps you from accidentally painting over onto other areas (like the sky, as seen here). Notice how the edge of my brush is extending out over onto the sky, but the red-tinted masked area is staying inside the edge of the dome, and is just applying the mask to the dome, not the sky. This is incredibly helpful when painting masks with the Brush tool.
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Step Three:
The trick to using this feature successfully is understanding how Lightroom decides where the edge of something is. You see that little + (plus sign) icon in the center of the brush (I put a red arrow here aiming right at it)? That determines what gets affected as you paint. So, any area that the + travels over gets painted. It’s okay if the outside edge of the brush strays outside the dome, onto the sky, as long as that + in the center doesn’t stray over past the edge. Keep that + over the dome and it usually won’t spill over. Here, I increased the Exposure amount, then I intentionally let the + extend over onto the sky a bit, so you can see what I mean. Now, it’s brightening the exposure of the sky as I paint.
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Step Four:
Let’s paint over the rest of the dome with Auto Mask turned on, and then let’s even paint over the tower on the right to brighten it (but don’t let that + [plus sign] go over the windows in that tower or it will brighten them, too). Again, all we have to really keep an eye on is that center + as we paint. Even though the edge of my brush is extending well outside the top of the tower here, it’s keeping my masking to the tower. Since that little + didn’t stray over onto the sky, it didn’t brighten it at all, and that is the magic of Auto Mask.
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