- 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
What to Do If It Doesn’t Work Perfectly
As amazing as Select Subject is in finding and masking your main subject, what happens if it masks (selects) too much of your image (more than the subject you wanted) or it doesn’t select the whole subject you’re trying to mask? Luckily, it’s usually a pretty easy fix because it uses AI to help you create just the mask you were looking for. So, it does some of the work for you, and then you do the other part.
Step One:
Here, we want to select just the subject in this image (the statue of Saint Theodore of Amasea in the famous St. Mark’s Square in Venice, Italy), so we can brighten it and add some texture and clarity, without affecting the sky behind it. 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). Note: Adobe put the three most-used masks up top since it’s probably one of those you’re looking for.
)
Step Two:
When you click the Subject icon, Lightroom analyzes the image to determine what is most likely your subject, and then displays its choice in a red tint overlay (as seen here, where the column and statue have that red tint). If you were to start moving sliders at this point, the only thing that would be affected is the area in that red tint (known as the “masked area.”). It actually did a decent job of selecting (masking) most of the column and statue here, but if you look closely, it also selected some other areas, like part of the sky between his arm and body, between his legs, below his shield, and below the front of the crocodile he’s conquered. So, Select Subject actually selected a little more than we wanted, but we can fix that.
)
Step Three:
Let’s press Command-+ (PC: Ctrl-+) a couple of times to zoom in, so we can really see the areas where it selected more than it should have (you can see even more areas here, than I pointed out). If you look at the zoomed-in image here, you can see that red tint also spilled over onto the sky between his head and his spear. What we want to do is remove all those areas of the sky from the mask, and luckily we can use some AI to help us do that. Go to the Masks panel, click on the Subtract button (because we want to subtract from what’s already masked. If you don’t see the Subtract button, click on Mask 1 to reveal it). From the pop-up menu that appears, choose Select Sky and it subtracts any areas of sky from the Select Subject mask we created just a moment ago.
)
Step Four:
You can see here how much better the mask now looks once we subtracted the sky from our original Select Subject mask. However, there’s another problem area in this image (as you’ll see in the next step).
)
Step Five:
If you look in the top right of the image, you’ll see our original Select Subject mask also selected the round object on top of the pillar on the museum’s roof. If we didn’t want that area masked (selected), we’d literally just use a brush to remove it by clicking on the Subtract button again, but this time, choosing the Brush tool (as shown here) as the tool we’d use to subtract from our red-tinted masked area. Then, we’d simply paint right over that round object and the red tint would go away, letting us know that area is no longer part of our mask and it wouldn’t be affected by any edits we made with our sliders. But, we have another option: what if we want to include that museum building on the right in our mask, so when we adjust the column and statue to stand out more, it makes the building stand out, too?
)
Step Six:
In that case, we won’t use the Subtract button; we’ll use the Add button. So, click on the Add button, and from the pop-up menu, click on the Brush tool. Now, start painting over that building on the right (if you turn on the Auto Mask checkbox at the bottom of the Brush panel, it will help keep you from painting outside the building onto the sky). As you paint, it adds the red tint because you’re adding to our existing mask. So, that’s the process: If something’s masked that’s not supposed to be, you’ll click the Subtract button, and then choose whichever tool makes removing that area the easiest (you’ll learn more about each of these tools in this chapter). If an area doesn’t get masked that you want to be (like the building, here), you’ll click the Add button and choose whichever tool would make adding more to your mask the easiest. Again, you’ll learn more about the other methods in just a few pages. But we’re not done yet.
)
Step Seven:
Go ahead and finish painting over the building until it’s fully in a red tint (as seen here). When you’re done, you’ll see three tiny icons on the image that represent the three mask adjustments we added. We started with (1) Select Subject, so it put its icon (a silhouette of a head and shoulders) right on the column itself. That’s an “Edit Pin” for that adjustment (this will make more sense in a moment). Then, we used (2) Select Sky to remove the sky from our mask—its Edit Pin appears in the sky (and looks like a tiny landscape photo). Lastly, we chose the (3) Brush tool and painted over the building on the right to add it to our mask, so its Edit Pin appears whereever you started painting (and looks like a tiny paint brush). If you look in the Masks panel, you’ll see the main mask we started with (Mask 1), and then below it, the three things we did to that mask: the Brush tool (Brush 1), Select Sky (Sky 1), and Select Subject (Subject 1). Hover your cursor over any of those mask adjustments and three dots appear to the right of its thumbnail, and if you click these, it reveals a pop-up menu with more options (like the ability to delete the adjustment). If you want to hide the effects of a mask adjustment, just click on the eye icon to the right of its thumbnail (seen here).
)
Step Eight:
Now that we have the mask we want (with the column, statue, and building on the right), any changes we make with the adjustment sliders below the Masks panel will affect just those areas and not the sky. Here’s a before and after where I made our masked areas brighter with the Whites slider, opened up the Shadows, added some Contrast, and then some Texture and Clarity to bring out extra detail. This ability to add and subtract from your mask is really helpful and although you won’t need to do this every time you add a mask, now you know how to do it (and how easy it is to do).
)
