- 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
Editing Your Background
You’ve learned how to have Lightroom automatically mask your subject so you can adjust your subject’s brightness, and tweak any other settings you’d like, but what if you want the opposite? What if the thing that needs tweaking in the image isn’t your subject as much as it is the background? Here’s the easy way to do just that:
Step One:
Here’s the image we’re going to work on. The background is a bit too bright here, and we really want our subject to stand out from the background. So, we want to darken its exposure a bit, and pull back some of those bright highlights.
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Step Two:
We’ll start by having Lightroom mask the background for us. So, go to the top of the right side panels and click on the Masking icon (the circle with the white dotted lines around it, in the toolbox right below the histogram) to reveal the Add New Mask panel with the masking tools, and then click on the Background icon (as shown here). When you do this, a red tint appears over the area Lightroom masked for you (which is the image’s background here). However, there is one problem: it selected a little too much. Notice the table she’s leaning on? That’s in the foreground, but since it appears in the red tint, any adjustments we make to darken the background will also darken the table. We don’t want this, but luckily it’s an easy fix.
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Step Three:
When I have a masking problem like this, the first question I ask myself is: “Which tool would fix this the easiest” (which speaks to the laziness in me). Of course, I could use the Brush tool and paint over the table, but there’s a quicker way, and that’s what I’m looking for—quick and easy. This is a two-click fix: Go to the Masks panel, and under Mask 1, you should see two buttons: Add and Subtract (if you don’t see them, click directly on Mask 1 and they’ll pop down). Click on the Subtract button (because we need to subtract that table from our background mask), and from the pop-up menu that appears, choose Linear Gradient (as shown here). Now, take that tool and click-and-drag it from the center of the table upward to around the bottom of her wrist on her front arm. This removes the area under your gradient from the Background mask, and it smoothly graduates to transparent at her wrist, so it doesn’t mess with the background behind her. I think this gradient is the quickest method, but if you’re not familiar with using the Linear Gradient (you will be soon—don’t worry), then you could use the Brush tool instead and just manually paint it away. Your call.
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Step Four:
Now that only the background is masked, let’s drag the Exposer slider to the left to darken it (here, I dragged it down one full stop to –1.00), and then let’s pull back the highlights by dragging the Highlights slider to the left (I pulled them back to –50, here). She really pops off that background now, and we didn’t mess with her exposure (she seemed properly exposed). But by darkening the background it makes her stand out more while maintaining her proper exposure. That’s all there is to it.
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