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Range Masking

Lesson 3 from: Developing and Retouching in Adobe Lightroom Classic

Jared Platt

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Lesson Info

3. Range Masking

Next Lesson: Dodge and Burn

Lesson Info

Range Masking

So now that we've got that one all set up, we're gonna go back and click on that pin. And remember, I'm still spilling over so that softness is going into her hair and all that kind of stuff. So I'm gonna turn this mask overlay back on so you can see it. I'm gonna zoom back out and I'm going to go into the bottom of that brush. So remember, our pin is active, and I'm going to the very bottom where all the brush controls are. So you see, this is a brush of be brush and then on a race brush so I could click on this a race, and I could actually go in and erase the areas that are not her skin. And I could even use the auto mask feature that would help to identify the edges of her skin. But all of that's a little bit labor intensive. And so instead of doing that, I'm going to do it the easy way. And that's what the range mask. So the range mask is one of my favorite tools. I'm simply in a click on it and choose color. Then I'm going to choose this little dropper and I'm gonna come over here...

and I'm going to choose her skin as the color. Now I can either choose little points and I can choose, like, I think, five points, you know, click, click, click and then shift, click and adds, Or I can just draw a box around an area, and then it'll average that area and say, OK, anything that's this color in this box is part of the mask. So I'm gonna click on her cheek and just drag across her skin like this, and that's about right and boom. See how it just removed all of this other stuff? So now it's got a perfect selection right here on the edge. It's got a pretty good selection right at the edge of her dress. It's got a great selection on this side that it's not as good right here, cause some of that shadow is the same, but it's mostly taking care of. And then I can go down to the amount slider that's right below the range color mask, and I congrats that amount slider and slide it to the left, and it chooses mawr accurately the skin. See that see how her over here. Her lips are showing through the mask. Her eyes are showing through the mask. Her hair is definitely showing through the mask. But you see how the shoulder is not that shoulders getting removed with it. So what I want to do is find a happy medium where I get the shoulder and the pink lips show through and and so I'm I'm softening her skin. I'm not softening your eyes at all. Um, it's doing a pretty good job selecting her arms. I think that's a pretty good, happy medium that's at 17. Probably take it up to about 20. Okay, so now I'm gonna put my little color dropper away, and I'm gonna zoom back out. Ah, here. And now that she way don't want to keep her green. So we're gonna undo. We're gonna turn off this mask overlay, and now you can see that her skin is softened. But everything else finding now on this softening tool because it's so subtle, it's not like you're gonna notice it if there's a little bit of ah, on edge, that's off. So I think it's great. I don't have to do anything to it. But if for some reason you were doing something that was a little bit more invasive, um and you needed to make sure it wasn't hitting that hair, then it would just be a matter of zooming into the photo coming in to the brush itself. And you can still edit the mask with your brush and that will override whatever range mask had happened. So remember, do this at the end. So do the range mask first that does the bulk of the work on the mask and then you turn it to the final finesse of the mask is simply coming in and erasing out the areas that you don't want in there. So you could just come in in a race like this. So I'm just There you go. Just a racing around her hair like that. They're so that hair is not gonna be a problem. This hair, I think I will leave because it's a wisp of hair and I don't want to risk like, I could come in here and turn on the auto mask, which is right here, this little feature below the erase button. If you click on auto mask, if you collect the right amount of information, you might be able to get it to auto, mask out just the hair, but because her skin is the same colors, that hair probably not gonna work very well. So I'm gonna leave that. But I am gonna keep the auto mask on here because it will do a good job right there cause there's a shadow below that hair and it's different than the hair. So I'm just going in and trying to get this stuff you see in that place I spent, I went over the top of her skin, so I'm not gonna go. They're gonna turn off the auto mask, which, by the way, is the a key. So if I just toggle it on auto mask off, Um, so I'm and I'm not worried about trying to get right close to her face as much as I am just trying to get these big, bulky pieces of hair so that they're no longer inside that mask because they are the same color as her face. And so that could become a problem. When you're trying toe not get crispy, here are blurry hair. So at this point, I know there's a shadow there and then a highlight our face. So if I turn on the auto mask, I could certainly come in, and it will do a pretty good job following the edges of her face. And now zoom out, see if there's anything else. I think everything else is fine. And so now we can turn off the green and boom, she's good at this point. If I wanted to change something, I could I could come in here and say All right, I like everything, but I want this to glow a little bit more, so we're gonna take her and just brighten up her skin a little bit. I like that. I'm gonna take the shadows up a little bit more, and I'm going to take the warmth down just just a tad so I can work on all of that. But then watch what happens if I So I finished. And I am like, that looks great. But the whole effect needs to be taken down just a little bit. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna come up to this little area right here of the very top where it tells the name of my effect, and it also says it's been edited, so it's not the original affected. It's been adjusted a little bit and I'm gonna click on this little triangle, and it actually removes all of my settings for the effect, and it says amount 30.77% of the amount. So now what I can do is I can take that amount and I can either go up with it and it increases everything at once. So it's increasing at all relative to itself. So it took the effect and made into an idea. And then it's increasing the idea. So if it was just a little bit of brightness, but a lot of softness, the softness would go up a lot, whereas the brightness would go up a little. And so I can just re negotiate what I've done to this so that it's not quite so. This is nothing. And now I can just come in and just barely bring that thing in. So I'm just kind of slowly working at until I like the way it feels done. Now I'm gonna make sure that if you if you're looking at your effects panel, and it looks like this. Click on that little triangle to open it up, because that's where all your effects are. Okay, so that is using the brush to do retouching. Now the great thing about this entire area up here, inside of light room in all of these local local adjustments is that if you learn how to use one, you will know how to use all of them because they all have the same tools inside of them and as they ADM or tools inside of them. They will just show up here and you'll have more control over fine detail inside of the photograph. I can remember back when there was very little stuff in here. Mostly it was temperature, tent exposure, that kind of stuff. But now you can see that there's texture and clarity and D. Hayes and saturation sharpness noise. So if you have a certain area in the photograph, that's a bit noisy, but that's the only place that you have the noise. Then just come here and paint the noise out instead of trying to globally add noise reduction when it's harming the rest of the photograph. Or you could if you have noise in an entire photograph, You could You could de noise the entire photograph and then come back in and add back. So instead of instead of coming in here instead of so you add noise globally and then you would come into the noise here and reduce it, reduce the noise filter down, and then paint that back in and it would it would take away that noise. So you have a lot of abilities to go one way or the other with all of these. They all started zero, and they can go negative or they can go positive. So they're all they're all able to do a lot of work. Plus, you can even add color to them. So sometimes, uh, you might need, like, a little wash of color over someone's face or something like that. Maybe +11 thing you'll notice is people have all this here. Let's do it. I'm gonna make a new one. So if I want to make a new brush, I'll click on new, and then I'm just gonna double click the effect to wipe it out. So it zero and then I'm actually just gonna go into my presets and find the preset that I want, which is actually going to be lips, and I'm going to just do a kind of a lipstick enhance. So now look what it's done. It has brought the exposure down, so it's gonna deep in whatever color the lips are, and it's gonna increase the saturation of the lips. That's all it's doing. So it's a very simple tool, and I'm just going to go in and I'm gonna choose the brush, the flow and the size of the brush. So let's zoom back out and zoom into her lips, and I'm just gonna paint her lips. So here we go and it's OK that it's a little darker than I wanted to. So those I'm making her lips a little bit too dark. But that's alright, because I can then take that effect and just click on the effect panel. Teoh, turn it into the amount slider and just bring the amount back down. So it zero and then just bring it in. How rich do I want her lips? That's perfect right there. Out. That's too much. Pull it out a little bit there. That's still too much pull it out just a little bit more there. So if you could do that with lips, you could. Also, if someone has like a red nose or a sunburn, you can go in and paint a different color of skin tone over that area of their skin. So if I wanted her lips toe, have a different tone or color to them, I could come into the bottom of this effect here, open up the effect. Come down to the bottom and there's a little color area. If I click on that color, it's just like all the other places where you see color in the develop module, you just simply click on there and choose a color that you want to apply to her lips. But in my case, I can just go over to her lips and choose a particular color that I want to apply. And so it's chosen a specific color, and now I can choose how much saturation I want on that color to be added to her lips. So if I wanted to add more of a red to her lips, I could actually go choose red, and then I could just take the saturation down until I liked the red that I was applying to her lips. And remember, I've added read to her lips, and I've darkened the lips a little bit. So it looks like she has a completely different color of makeup and let me turn off and then on. See that? So I have effectively brightened up her skin. I've smoothed out her skin. I've retouched her skin, and I've given her a little bit more lipstick with a little slightly different color simply inside of the brush and the spot tool inside of of light room. So there's a lot that we could do inside of light room without ever going to photo shop.

Class Materials

Bonus Materials with Purchase

Workflow in Adobe Lightroom
Adobe Lightroom Mobile Cloud
Adobe Lightroom Image Pipeline System
Black & White Preset Collection
Color Art Pro Profiles

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