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Masking Pt 2

Lesson 15 from: Photo Editing in Lightroom Classic for The Photo Enthusiast

Jared Platt

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Lesson Info

15. Masking Pt 2

Learn more masking techniques in Lightroom that will help you to select just the right areas on your images for maximum effect and efficiency.
Next Lesson: Masking Pt 3

Lesson Info

Masking Pt 2

now let's take what we've learned about masks and do a little bit more practical application, like for instance in this photograph, my biggest problem with this image is this yellow jacket and I want to get rid of that yellow jacket. So it's standing out like a sore thumb. So I'm going to go up and create a new mask. And this time our mask is actually going to be created solely based on a color range because that's the only yellow there. So I'm just going to click on that color range. So again, I created a new mask and clicked on color range and then it gives me this little dropper. I'm just gonna draw across the jacket like that. So I get all the different parts or the different tones of that color. So once I've selected it you can see that it's been selected. Let me show the overlay. And you can see that it also got this part and some of the leaves back there, so it's spilling beyond the region of the jacket. And I also noticed that it hasn't quite selected the whole jacket. There's ...

some still yellow here so I can hit shift that turns into a plus sign and then I can just draw over the top of that little area and that adds that and then let me look around and make sure everything looks okay. Good. Alright, so now we have a good selection on that, but it spills. So now what we have to do is intersect. So we're gonna go to mask and click on the triple dot button and we're going to intersect it and this time we're going to intersect with the subject. So I'm gonna click on select subject and so now what it's gonna do is it's going to find the subject and notice that it just said okay, I'm only going to allow the yellow to be selected within the walls of the subject itself. And the subject happens to be all three of these people, which means that he's selected and this guy is selected. So anywhere that's yellow on him is also going to be selected. So we have to find a way to get rid of that, which is really easy because we just click on this and say subtract from the selection with a brush and I can just go in and remove that area, remove any areas that are selected on the subject that have that yellow to them. There we go. And so now the only thing that's selected is his yellow jacket. So now we can come back out of the photograph and we can turn off the selected mask overlay. And instead of brightening up the jacket and making it worse, we can darken it down. So I'm going to bring it down. So that's a little bit darker. And then I'm also going to go into the hue and instead of having a yellow jacket, I'm going to grab onto the hue and I'm going to change it to blue that's purple, they're blue. And then we can take the highlights down on it and we can take the white down on it just a bit and we can take the shadow down so see how we're just changing that jacket so that it's different than the other than the yellow. I don't mind it being different than their jacket, but at least now it doesn't call attention to itself, it is just another jacket. So all you're doing is providing rules for the selection of a mask. So in this case, the first rule was the color range which was yellow. The second rule was the subject which is the three people. And the third rule which was subtracting was painting over certain areas that had been selected. So, with those three rules, color range subject and a brush, we were able to get that mask, which then allowed us to change a yellow, bright ugly jacket into a blue, dark, meaningless jacket. So that then all we're looking at in this photograph is a bunch of people walking down the road and I like that much better. I can play around with that a little bit more. And I'm going to actually create another mask. And this time I'm going to do a vignette with a radial gradient, I'm gonna do this over the top of them. But I'm going to go over to the invert button and invert it and then I'm going to take everything outside that circle and darken it down. Now I'm really liking what we're getting and I can move this around wherever I like and I can even drop it even more and watch what I'm going to do. So I like what I'm getting here. I like how dark it is. I'm gonna actually go down to the bottom so I'm going down into the photograph itself and I'm gonna bring up the highlights on the photograph. C I want that path to glow a little bit more up near them. So I'm making the path glow a little bit extra and then I'm coming right back up to my mask and I'm bringing it down so that I see that I love what's going on now. So now what we're gonna do is I'm gonna take this and I'm going to intersect it. Actually not intersect it, I'm going to subtract from it, I'm going to subtract out so that you can't see the subject in that radial mask. So watch what happens when I do that, subtract that out and see how they pop out a little bit. Now let me show you what happens if I turn this off if I allow that circular gradient to work all the way through without any other rules, that's what it looks like. But if I want to call more attention to the travelers, all I have to do is remove the subject from that mask and the mask goes behind them. So watch what happens boom now they are sticking out of that just a little bit. It's subtle, but it's very nice and I really like what we've got going on here, so I'm going to keep that version of the image that looks really quite cool.

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Ratings and Reviews

Byron Sieber
 

Jared does an excellent job at taking a subject and breaking it down step by step. He includes great explanations along the way to help you understand why he is doing something. His results, which are great photos, speak for themselves.

user-814d7a
 

Excellent class with great detail on the new Masking tools! Thanks, Jared!

Michael Grosso
 

Excellent overview of the features included in the most recent upgrade of Adobe Lightroom. Very practical applications are covered at a very good pace. Thank you!

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