- 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 Main Subject
Lightroom has borrowed some amazing technology from its cousin Photoshop that uses AI and machine learning to determine what the subject of your image is and it isolates (masks) that area, so you can adjust only your subject without affecting the rest of the image. This is really powerful stuff and opens up a whole new world of editing right here in Lightroom, without having to jump over to Photoshop (which we previously had to do for stuff like this).
Step One:
At the top of the right side panels, 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. Now, click on the Subject icon (as shown here) to have Lightroom analyze the image, determine what the subject is, and mask only that subject so you can edit it without affecting the rest of the image.
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Step Two:
When you click the Subject icon, after a second or two, it puts a red tint over your subject (as seen here), letting you know what it masked (if it didn’t perfectly select your subject—that was the case here—I cover what to do when that happens starting on page 194). When a mask is created like this, the Masks panel appears floating to the left of the right side panels (see page 190 for how to dock it with the other panels). You’ll see “Mask 1” appear in the panel and that represents the area that is masked. Below that mask, it shows that Select Subject (Subject 1) was used to create the mask (if you only see Mask 1, click on it to expand it, so it looks like what you see here, with Subject 1 visible, along with the Add and Subtract buttons).
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Step Three:
If you scroll down a bit beneath the toolbox, you’ll see the adjustment sliders you can use to adjust your masked subject. If they look familiar, it’s because they’re the same sliders from the Basic panel, with one exception: there’s no Vibrance slider, only a Saturation slider. But, Adobe engineered this one slider to be Vibrance when you drag it to the right, and Saturation when you drag it to the left (to desaturate the image). Pretty slick. Now that your subject is masked, as soon as you drag an adjustment slider, the red tint goes away, so you can clearly see your adjustments as you make them. Here, to make the ship stand out a bit more, I increased the Exposure, Contrast, Shadows, and Whites a bit. The edits you make in this Masks panel only affect your subject, not the rest of the image, because you masked your subject using Select Subject.
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Step Four:
Below, I pressed the Y key on my keyboard to give you a before/after look, so you can see how the changes we made only affected the ship (the main subject) and not the rest of the image.
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