Just playing with Lightroom masks

[davidedric]

Just starting to play with Lightroom masking. Of course, it's not as rich as Photoshop, but it's possible to create pretty effective masks very quickly.

The first is the image as is. The second using "select subject". Select subject twice and then invert on so that you have the background selected.

[DanK]

Thanks for posting. I have tried a few times as well. As one would expect, the more the subject differs from the background, the better. I tried with a photo of a gray heron against a complicated background with some grays, and the automated selection failed pretty badly. Still, I think this is going to be very useful in some circumstances. Also, while I am still getting used to it, I think the new mask interface, where all of the masks appear in a list in a separate panel, will turn out to be a very big improvement.

[pnodrog]

I find the new LR masking interface a great improvement.

I have tried both the sky and subject masks options and usually found I need to adjust the selection by adding a brush selection. However for the sort of editing I do I find it a great improvement and my visits' to Photoshop have reduced dramatically.

[lunaticitizen]

I've tried this too. Usually for environmental portraits or to be precise in my case, snapshots. Just reduce the 'Texture' and 'Clarity' for the subjects and leave everything else as is^^

It's not perfect sometimes but better, I mean much faster, than my using Photoshop.

[Stagecoach]

I found it extremely useful and time saving on a recent project enabling the fast correction, or more accurately how I wanted the results, of participants in an event.

As can be seen in the original the subjects are dark although the tee shirts were just clipped in places and the subject selection was perfect other than the fingers on his left hand.

[Ken MT]

Looks like the guy must have fallen in the river!

[Stagecoach]

Looks like the guy must have fallen in the river!

Maybe, but they had just completed the 15K white water raft race section, crossed two rivers to get to this point before starting the overland trek. Oh, and it was raining non stop, I know because I was stood in that river for an hour and a half getting very wet myself whilst the camera hogged the umbrella

[lunaticitizen]

Not perfect, but way faster than Photoshop.

[Manfred M]

Not perfect, but way faster than Photoshop.

Photoshop has similar functionality and it is lighting fast and more adjustable / tunable than the LR version. This was part of the 2022 release.

[lunaticitizen]

Photoshop has similar functionality and it is lighting fast and more adjustable / tunable than the LR version. This was part of the 2022 release.

Oh I see. I know zilch about recent updates on PS. Well it's not like I was following news about either LR or PS, either. I believe I read about the LR new feature here.

[Stagecoach]

Photoshop has similar functionality and it is lighting fast and more adjustable / tunable than the LR version. This was part of the 2022 release.

What I can tell you from my own experience is that the 'new' mask function can be a real time waster

Processing hundreds of images this weekend of which many were backlit head or half body shots at f/2.8 to 3.5 with smooth plain backgrounds it works so well you just HAVE to use it rather than a simple procedure such as global shadow lift

[Manfred M]

Oh I see. I know zilch about recent updates on PS. Well it's not like I was following news about either LR or PS, either. I believe I read about the LR new feature here.

Photoshop has had something called the "Quick Selection Tool" for a long time (several years), which seems to be able to determine edges quite well, especially in areas of reasonably good contrast. The newest release in both Photoshop and LR / ACR seems to have automated that functionality a bit more and it can identify larger contiguous objects automatically.

For someone like me, who uses selections in my workflow a lot, both tools are great, but the selections are often not good enough so I have to refine them with more traditional techniques.

[DanK]

I think that focusing (no pun intended) only on the automatic subject selection misses the boat. The new selection tools are vastly better than the old ones. True, Photoshop can do this better, but I don't think they were introduced to compete with Photoshop. I think they were introduced to make Lightroom far more powerful, and they do that. The number of times I will need to export to Photoshop has been reduced, I think.

The first change that has really mattered to me is that all of the masks are now listed in a tidy dialog box, making it simple to modify them. And one of the advantages of parametric editing is that there is zero cost to returning to an "earlier" mask, since the software internally pays no attention to the order in which you make the edits. The second is that you can now combine masks in three different ways.

The third--and so far, this has had the biggest impact for me--is that Lightroom now has properly implemented luminosity and color masking. They don't hold a candle to something like Kuyper's TK8, but they are pretty close to Photoshop's native capabilities. And these masks can be combined.

Even in Photoshop, automatic subject selection has its limitations, and these go beyond edges that need cleaning up. What it recognizes as a "subject" depends on the training set, and that training set doesn't always include the right stuff. One of the first times I tried it, I tried to select a woman holding a small child. I wanted to edit the woman. Photoshop decided that the pair of them together were the subject. I suppose it would make sense to label them as the subject in training images, but it wasn't what I wanted.