- 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 Easy Way to Mask Anything (Not Just the Subject)
If you choose Select Subject, Lightroom analyzes your photo and picks what it thinks is the main subject, which is great if that’s what you want to edit. But what if you want to edit something that’s not the main subject, and you don’t want to have to carefully paint a perfect mask for it? That’s when the quite-brilliant Objects masking tool comes in handy because it lets you pretty much mask anything in your image in two-seconds flat. Maybe faster. This is one powerful tool and one you’ll probably wind up using it a lot. Here’s how it works:
Step One:
Here’s our image. If we clicked 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 clicked on the Subject icon what do you think it would select? That’s right—pretty much everything on the tray (well, I tried it and it missed the butter on the left, but it selected everything else). But, what if all we wanted it to mask was the butter? What if we just wanted to make the butter brighter? That’s when we’d click on Objects (as shown here, bottom left). When you do this, it brings up the Select Objects panel beneath the Masks panel where you’ll see two modes: You can brush over an area to select it, using (1) Brush Select mode—but if you’re going to do that, you might as well just choose the Brush tool, right? Instead, I prefer the second option: (2) Rectangle Select mode (circled here, bottom right) It’s much faster and easier all the way around.
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Step Two:
Once you choose this mode, take the Objects tool and click-and-drag it over the object in your image you want to mask (in this case, I’m dragging it over the butter) to have it automatically sense where the edges of the object (and the object itself) are so it can mask just that object.
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Step Three:
When you let go of your mouse (or your pen, if that’s what you’re using), it recognizes the object and selects just that (you can see that only the butter dish is masked here). What I find so amazing is that even though my rectangular selection extended over onto the bakery bowl (whose contents were pretty tasty, I might add), it didn’t select any of that bowl—only the small butter dish I wanted. It consistently does a pretty great job at masking objects like this.
TIP: If It Doesn’t Fully Select the Object, Grab the Brush Tool
That’s right. Once you drag out your selection with the Objects tool, if it misses an area of the object you want masked, just go to the Mask panel, click on the Add button (beneath Mask 1), choose Brush, and then paint over any part it missed. If you want to mask a second object, click that same Add button, but choose Object, and then click-and-drag around the second object.
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Step Four:
With just the butter dish now selected, I increased its Exposure, and brought out its texture by adding Clarity and Texture.
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