- 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 4: Preserving Your Clouds Using a Luminance Mask
The one-click Sky mask works great, but when you have white, puffy clouds, and you darken the exposure of the sky, it also darkens the clouds, which can make your nice, white clouds look dark and ominous. Luckily, there’s a feature called Luminance Range that lets you create a mask based on the highlight or shadow areas in your image (so you can select all the bright areas or all the dark areas to work on), which is incredibly handy in all sorts of situations. In this case, we’re going to use the Sky mask to select the sky, then we’re going to make it a dark, rich blue, but then we’ll use Luminance Range to remove the clouds from the mask, so they still appear white and fluffy.
Step One:
Here’s our original image with a light sky, and we’re going to do the same stuff as usual to darken 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 Sky icon (as shown here) to have it select the sky for you.
)
TIP: Seeing/Hiding Your Edit Pins
You have a choice of how Lightroom displays your Edit Pins (the tiny pins that appear over your image, each representing a mask you’ve applied), and you make that choice from the Show Edit Pins pop-up menu down in the toolbar beneath the Preview area. Choosing Auto means when you move your cursor outside the image area, the pins hide. Always means they’re always visible, and Never means you never see them. Selected means you only see the currently active pin.
Step Two:
You’ll see the red tint over the sky showing what Select Sky has masked for you. With just the sky selected, drag the Exposure slider to the left quite a bit (I went to –1.90, here) to darken it. You can also add some more blue to the sky by dragging the Temp slider (in the Color panel) to the left, a little toward blue. In the next step, you’ll see how the sky looks with the exposure lowered, but you’ll notice that it darkens both the sky and the white, puffy clouds as well, which is not awesome (well, in most cases, it’s not awesome).
)
Step Three:
What we need to do is subtract those clouds from our Sky mask. In the Masks panel, click on the Subtract button (if you don’t see the Add and Subtract buttons, click on Mask 1 to make them visible), and then from the pop-up menu that appears, click on Luminance Range (as shown here, bottom left). Now, when the Luminance Range panel appears (seen here, bottom right), your cursor will change into the Luminance Range eyedropper tool (circled here). Just click it on the area you want to subtract from your image—in this case, I clicked on a cloud. As I mentioned in the intro, this tool masks based on the brightness of an area, so as you’ll see in the next step, it removed everything of similar brightness from our Sky mask. Besides using the eyedropper, you can also drag the Luminosity Range sliders to limit or add to the amount of tones it’s masking for you. You do this by dragging the slider knobs directly below the tone ramp. Dragging the left knob to the right limits how many highlights are selected, and dragging the right knob to the left limits the amount of shadow areas that are selected. Turning on the Show Luminance Map checkbox here (which adds the red tint overlay) can help make it much easier to see which areas are being affected.
)
Step Four:
Here’s our final image with the sky darker and richer, thanks to the Sky mask and darkening the exposure (and adding in some blue). But, you’ll notice that the clouds aren’t darkened thanks to removing them (the highlights) from the mask using Luminance Range.
)
