The latest update to Adobe Lightroom Classic — released late October during Adobe MAX — introduced some new local adjustment tools, including the new Masking panel. You can now choose Select Subject or Select Sky. These do exactly what you think they do, selecting the subject or sky for you.
I decided to see how it would do with a low light image. Or two.
Testing the local adjustment tools on a low light image
I loaded a photograph of a car that was light painted during the exposure. In the Develop module, I selected the new Masking icon, which is a circle with a dotted line around it. Instantly, I could tell that the local adjustment choices had changed. Now we can select even more methods of targeting a specific set of parameters: Select Subject, Select Sky, Brush, Linear Gradient, Color Range, Luminance Range and Depth Range.Â
Furthermore, you can create new masks. You could with previous versions of Lightroom, but I feel that this layout makes it more intuitive. You can also rename the masks, as I have done in the example.
Today, I’ll explore the first two methods of selection.
Select Subject
After I pressed Select Subject, Lightroom almost immediately selected the car. If it had not selected the car correctly, I would have been able to use the brush tool to add or subtract from its selection. This is provided in the Masks menu.
Furthermore, Lightroom retained my settings from a previous edit. If I wanted a similar starting point for, say, texture or sharpen, this would literally be a single click and I would be finished.
Select Sky
Next, I wanted to select the sky. Sometimes, especially for a low ISO night image such as this, all I need to do is reduce the amount of noise by a small amount. If the sky is bright, I might want to reduce the exposure or dehaze or increase the contrast a little.
The targeted area has already been selected, so it’s just a matter of adjusting the parameters to your liking.Â
Local adjustment tools
As before, the local adjustments include most of the parameters that you would want to use to adjust a specific area. Whether cooling or warming the temperature, lowering or raising the exposure, or anything else, any of this can be applied non-destructively. In other words, if you come back the next day and decide that you wish to adjust something more, you may.
A more challenging selection
A car was one thing. What about an odd-shaped object that might be somewhat darker, sitting in front of a Milky Way sky?
As you can see, no problem. After pressing Select Subject, the radio telescope was instantly selected. If you look closely, you can see that it did select some of the sky. near the bottom of the dish. If you wanted, you could take away some of the selection by using a brush and selecting Subtract. Even if the selection is not exactly what you want, it still saves a lot of time compared to before.
Mask selection in a very dark sky with trees
For my final effort, I tried a very dark Milky Way scene with a dark foreground. And if that weren’t enough, I chose one with a tree. As you can see, the is still reasonably accurate, although if you zoom in, the mask, albeit a faded one, does include some of the trees and the distant mountains.
Still, though, this was accurate enough that I could brighten the sky if I wanted to and the tree and mountains stayed dark.
Thoughts so far
This will probably give people less reason to use some of the masking features in Photoshop, thus saving time. The masking isn’t as potentially sophisticated or specific as Photoshop can be. However, for many applications, it’s more than enough. And it’s quick and easy to use.
We’ve just covered Select Subject and Select Sky and mentioned using the Brush to add or subtract from the mask selection. However, there are many more masks to explore with Linear Gradient, Color Range, Luminance Range and Depth Range.
Good article, thanks! I have been watching tutorials to get acquainted with the new LR features. Photofocus, NPAN and Anthony Morganti, to name a few, all have good videos on different aspects of the new features. The addition of masking to LR is perfect for a guy like me who finds PS difficult to navigate.
PS is generally considerably less intuitive than LR. And LR’s seems to be implemented well. Photofocus and NPAN seem to always do really great video tutorials on things like this, and I saw part of Anthony Morganti’s video as well, and that one is pretty great. Much of it is quite easy, and hopefully a simple short article with screenshots can get a lot of people going. I am quite impressed with this implementation. It works remarkably well, and this is the first iteration, so there’s more to come.