- 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
Selecting People in Group Photos
If you have a group photo, you can use the People masking feature to select any individual person in the group, or any part of them (their hair, clothes, etc.), as well as just parts of the group (like everyone’s jeans). Here’s how:
Step One:
Click on the Masking icon (the circle with the white dotted lines around it, in the toolbox right below the histogram), then just wait a few seconds and you’ll see that Lightroom recognizes each person individually down in the People section (at the bottom of the panel), so you can isolate each one if you want to edit just a single person. As you hover your cursor over each person’s thumbnail, they’ll highlight in the red tint. Here, I hovered my cursor over the thumbnail of the woman second from the left in the image, and you can see she appears in the red tint overlay, indicating she’s masked. If we clicked on her thumbnail, it would display all the individual masks we could apply (Facial Skin, Body Skin, Eyebrows, and so on).
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Step Two:
If you want to mask multiple people, after clicking on a thumbnail, click on the Add People button (seen here, bottom left) in the Person Mask Options panel, and another panel appears with the thumbnail of each person in your photo. Turn on the checkboxes next to the people you want to mask (as seen here, bottom right, where I selected Person 1 and Person 3), and they will appear in the red tint. Click the Continue button at the bottom right of the panel, and then you can choose to entirely mask the people you selected, or just specific parts of them.
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Step Three:
If you want to mask all the people in your photo to adjust them all at once, click the All People button (seen here, bottom left) in the People section of the Add New Mask panel. When you click that, the panel of individual masking options appears (seen here, bottom right). If you do want to edit all of them at the same time (maybe you want to make them all brighter), in that Person Mask Options panel, make sure the Entire Person checkbox is turned on, then just click the Create Mask button at the bottom right, and then make your adjustments.
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Step Four:
After you’ve selected All People, and while you’re in the Person Mask Options panel, you can select any one of those options (Eyebrows, Clothes, Facial Skin, or as I did here, Hair), or even multiple options, and it selects and masks all of those areas (as seen here). So, now when you click Create Mask, any edits you make will only apply to those areas (all of their hair, here). Pretty darn clever.
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