- 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 3: Masking Objects
You just learned the technique for adding a Linear Gradient to a sky to darken it and make it richer and bluer, but you’re going to run into a trickier situation, like with the image you see below: when you drag out your gradient to darken the sky, it winds up darkening the foreground object (an iceberg, in this case, but it could be a mountain, a person, a building, etc.). But, luckily, there’s an easy fix.
Step One:
Here’s our original image (this is from a workshop I taught at in Antarctica), and you can see the sky is just screaming for us to use the Linear Gradient tool to fix it. What we want here is the sky to be darker, bluer, and better behind the iceberg in the photo, but even if you were to put a traditional screw-on filter in front of your lens, you’d have the same problem, which is it would darken the sky, but it would also darken part of the iceberg. That’s a limitation of traditional lens filters, but in Lightroom, we can get around this really easily. 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 then scroll down to the sliders and lower the Exposure amount to around –1.20 and the Temp amount to around –55 (that’s just a starting place).
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Step Two:
Now, press-and-hold the Shift key (to keep your gradient straight), and drag the Linear Gradient from the top of the image downward toward the horizon line (as shown here). A red tint shows you the area that’s being masked by the gradient, and you can see it’s darker at the top and then graduates down to transparent at the white circle at the bottom.
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Step Three:
While it did an awesome job darkening the sky, it also darkened the iceberg, as well (as seen here)—same as what would have happened if you put an actual gradient filter over your camera’s lens.
TIP: Adding More Gradients
If you want to add another gradient (maybe to darken the left side of the image) and keep the one on the sky you already have in place, just go to the Masks panel, click on Create New Mask, then click on Linear Gradient again, and then drag out your new gradient, which you can adjust separately.
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Step Four:
To fix this, go to the Masks panel and you’ll see two buttons below your Linear Gradient mask: Add and Subtract (if you don’t see them, click on Mask 1 to make them visible). Our gradient goes right over the iceberg, but of course, we don’t want it masked, so we’re going to remove it (subtract it) from our Linear Gradient mask. Click on the Subtract button and from the pop-up menu that appears, choose Select Subject (as shown here). That’s all there is to it. Lightroom’s AI recognizes the subject (the iceberg) and it removes (subtracts) it from your gradient mask. That’s something you can’t do with an actual filter you put on your lens, and a huge advantage of Lightroom’s Linear Gradient (plus, it’s just so darn easy to use).
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