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Masking Pt 4

Lesson 17 from: Photo Editing in Lightroom Classic for The Photo Enthusiast

Jared Platt

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Lesson Info

17. Masking Pt 4

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: Retouching

Lesson Info

Masking Pt 4

So here's an example of a portrait of a little girl at a tea party. And this is going to combine the idea of editing a portrait and editing a landscape at the same time. So I've done the adjustment to it. You can see that I've done the global adjustments. And now I just want to work on her and the surroundings kind of a burning and dodging situation because I don't necessarily need to do any major retouching. So she's not, she doesn't need any retouching on her done. So I've done all of the work on the global adjustments. I want to warm it up just slightly. But other than that I just need to do a little bit of burning and dodging to direct our attention in the right places. So the first mask I'm going to create is a linear gradient and I'm just going to draw kind of a darker. I just need to darken down this left hand corner so that it doesn't draw our attention. And then the same thing over here, I'm just going to create another mask and I'm gonna do a linear gradient and I'm going to ...

draw up on the right hand side. You notice that it's the same exposure because I did the exposure before I drew the gradient. So now it's dark below here. So it's going to push our eye up towards the table and towards the little girl. The next thing I want to do is I want to create a mask that's a brush. And the reason I want to brush mask is I want to come in here and brighten things up just a little bit out here. So I'm gonna kind of kind of just go around here and just kind of brighten up things back here in the background like this. And the reason I'm doing that is because I want it to seem as though the sun is hitting things a little bit more brightly and I'm even coming in and kind of adding some brightness to these to the foreground that I had already darkened down. But keep in mind that I've got most of it dark. I'm just kind of putting a little light through those bushes and now I can kind of play around with how much light that's going to be. So I just started with a pretty big one. I just started with a pretty over the top amount of brightness, but now I can go in and play with how much and then I can even increase the warmth of it. The problem is, is that I spilled, I spilled over the top of her, which I didn't want to do. So now I can simply come in and subtract the subject. Let's see how it just removed the subject from that. So now that mask floats behind her and you can see that she's there's her subject, there's the brush and there's the two of them together. So now I can independently work on the background and her and if I create another one and I just select the subject. Now she's selected and I can play around with her and brighten her up to whatever I feel is right for her. And in this case I'm just going to go into the highlights and just just brighten up her dress just a little bit, a little bit on her face and maybe add just a little bit of warmth to her there. So now she's independently exposed. The background is independently exposed. So I can actually work on either one of those. I can click here, I can bring the background ground down just a little bit so that she pops out a little bit more. I can go to the foreground and I can darken that up just a little bit and actually instead of using the exposure, I could use the shadow like that so that some of this extra stuff that I put in there, the lightness coming through doesn't, doesn't get burned back down. Um and then I can click on the mask over here and do the same thing. Bring up the exposure a little bit, bring the shadows down and I like what I like what we've done there and all of it was based in burning and dodging. The last thing I'm gonna do to this image is just crop it because I think it needs to tilt just a little bit more this way and I am ready for the client to see that image. So all of that was based in creating masks. A little bit of burning and dodging goes a long way on a photograph and being able to do that really quickly by making a I generated masks is an amazing tool. So get to know those masks because they are going to be your best friend when it comes to whether it's portraiture or landscapes or cityscapes or documentary photography, art, photography, still life, it doesn't matter whatever you're doing, those masks are going to help you get to your end goal faster. In fact, they're going to help you do things that you never could have imagined doing before. So get used to them and have fun.

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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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