- 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
Better Looking Skies, Method 2: Linear Gradient
The Linear Gradient tool lets you recreate the look of a traditional neutral density (ND) gradient filter (these are glass or plastic filters you put in front of your lens that are dark on top, and then graduate down to fully transparent). These are popular with landscape and travel photographers because due to the limitations of your camera’s sensor, you’re either going to get a perfectly exposed foreground or a perfectly exposed sky, but not both. However, Lightroom’s version actually has some big advantages over using a real ND gradient filter.
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 Linear Gradient (as shown here), and a set of sliders appears like the ones you’re used to seeing in the Basic panel (as seen in Step Two).
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Step Two:
Press-and-hold the Shift key (to keep your gradient straight while you’re dragging it), then click on the top center of your image, and drag straight downward until you reach just past the horizon line (as shown here). The red tint overlay shows the areas that will be affected. The gradient is darkest at the top (the line with the red dot) and stays like that until it hits the black square in the center, and then it transitions to transparent between that black square and the first white dot on the bottom line. You can click-and-drag that white dot to change how far down the gradient goes. To rotate it, hover your cursor over the second white dot (below the line) and it changes into a two-headed arrow that you can click-and-drag in a circular direction. Now, go down to the adjustment sliders, and let’s drag the Exposure slider to the left to –1.69 (as shown here) as a starting place (this amount is just a guess—we can dial in the right amount afterward). Just lowering the exposure will help our sky quite a bit, but we can do more than just darken the exposure.
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Step Three:
If lowering the Exposure amount didn’t make your sky look as awesome as you’d like, the next thing you can try is adding some blue into your sky gradient by simply dragging the Temp slider to the left toward blue (as shown here, where I dragged it to –27). By the way, adding blue was the right choice for this image, but it might be adding yellow or magenta or orange to the sky, depending on the image. This adding color to the sky is something you could never do with a real ND filter. A couple more quick things: (1) To delete your gradient, click on the black square in the center and press the Delete (PC: Backspace) key or go to the Masks panel, click-and-hold on the three dots to the right of the mask thumbnail, and from the pop-up menu that appears, choose Delete Mask “1.” (2) You can rotate your gradient while you’re dragging it out, if you don’t press-and-hold the Shift key to make it straight. And, (3) to move the entire Linear Gradient, click-and-drag the black square in the center.
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