- 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
Eight More Masking Things You’ll Want to Know
Before we move on to the next chapter, here are some more handy little features and techniques to know about masking:
#1: The Amount Slider
This is such an awesome feature because it allows you to lower (or increase) the intensity of the edits you’ve made with the adjustment sliders. But, rather than having to lower each slider the appropriate amount, this one slider lowers them all for you, which is just so incredibly handy (especially if you’re reviewing your edits and you feel like you went a bit too far—you can reach for this slider and just pull it all back a bit). You’ll find the Amount slider right below the Masks panel
#2: Changing the Red Tint Color
If you like the red-tinted overlay (I do), but you’re working on an image with a lot of red in it (like a cardinal, or a red car, or cardinal sitting on a red car), you might not be able to see that tint clearly. Your first thought might be that you have to change to a different mask view (we looked at these back on page 190), but you can actually just change the red tint color to pretty much any color you’d like. Click on the red color swatch in the bottom-right corner of the Masks panel (as shown here), which brings up a Color Picker where you can click on any overlay tint color you’d like. To reset it to red, just click on the red Custom Colors swatch in the picker, and then close it by clicking on the “X” in the top right.
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#3: Duplicating & Moving Masks
If you have a mask in place and you want a copy of it—to maybe use somewhere else in that same image—in the Masks panel, click on the three dots to the right of the mask’s thumbnail, and choose Duplicate [name of mask] from the pop-up menu (as shown here). Once you have the duplicate, you can click on its Edit Pin on your image and drag the mask to whatever position you want. Note: You don’t have to duplicate a mask to move it—you can click-and-drag an Edit Pin any time you want.
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#4: Resizing the Floating Masks Panel
If you leave the Masks panel floating (rather than docking it with the right side panels; we looked at this back on page 190), you can have it cover less of your image by clicking on the two right-facing arrows in the right side of the panel’s header. That shrinks the panel down to a tall, vertical strip with just the mask icons showing (as seen here, on the right).
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#5: Intersecting One Mask with Another
If you have a mask in place and you want to intersect it with another mask (leaving the area where the two masks overlap as the resulting mask), in the Masks panel, click on the mask you want intersected, then click on the three dots that appear to the right of the mask’s thumbnail. From the pop-up menu that appears, under Intersect Mask With, choose which of the masking tools you want to use to intersect with your current mask (as shown here, where I chose Select Objects to intersect with my current Brush mask).
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#6: Resetting Your Sliders
As we’re editing, we sometimes wind up moving a lot of adjustment sliders. If we don’t like the results and want to reset them back to zero, that could be an awful lot of sliders to have to reset one by one. Luckily, there’s an easier way to do this: just click on the word “Reset,” in the top-right corner of the panel (as shown here, circled in red), and it resets all your sliders to zero for you.
Your sliders get moved a lot during the editing process
Click on Reset and it resets them all to zero
#7: Copy/Paste/Sync Masks
If you copy-and-paste (or sync) settings from one image to another (by clicking on the Copy button, at the bottom of the left side panels, or the Sync button, at the bottom of the right side panels, when you have multiple images selected), you have the option of choosing which masks you created get copied-and-pasted. On the right side of the Copy Settings (or the Synchronize Settings) dialog, you’ll see a Masking checkbox, and below that are the individual masks you can choose to include or exclude (this is another reason to rename your masks, if you have more than a couple, as seen here. Otherwise, they just appear as “Mask 1,” “Mask 2,” etc.). Just turn on the checkboxes beside the masks you want to copy-and-paste.
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#8: The Depth Range Mask
At the bottom of the Add New Mask panel, under Range, is a choice that seems like it’s always grayed out: Depth Range. The reason is: it’s only for images where a depth map is created (like those taken with a recent iPhone in Portrait mode, which saves the out of focus area behind your subject as a depth map, or those taken with Lightroom mobile’s camera; see Chapter 14 for more on this). When you have that type of image in Lightroom, you can choose that mask, and then adjust it using the Depth Range sliders. Once the mask is in place, you can then use the editing tools to adjust only that masked area.
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