AI masking in Lightroom has quietly turned into one of the fastest ways photographers change the mood and focus of an image without touching every slider by hand. If you shoot portraits and landscapes and want your edits to look polished but still natural, this walkthrough shows how to let the software do the heavy lifting while you keep control over the final look.
Coming to you from Aaron Nace with Phlearn, this practical video walks you through how AI masks in Lightroom Classic separate a portrait into clean, editable pieces. Background, subject, skin, hair, and clothing each become their own adjustable area, so you can shape light and color instead of painting by hand. You watch the background get darkened with a single background mask, then softened further by subtracting a radial gradient to create a subtle glow around the subject. From there, Nace builds up the look by brightening the subject, shifting the color temperature a bit warmer, and adding measured texture and clarity so the clothing and facial detail feel sharp without turning crunchy. It is a clear example of how AI can speed up your process while still letting you make taste calls.
The video does not stop at a simple subject selection; it goes into Lightroom’s people-specific masking in a way that is actually useful in real edits. Nace creates separate control over clothing saturation, which lets him pull a bit more color out of the jeans without affecting skin, then builds a combined mask for facial skin, body skin, lips, hair, and eyes to refine luminosity on the subject’s features. Small moves to shadows, highlights, and exposure stack up to a much more intentional portrait. What stands out is how often he jumps back into masks to tweak things like hair brightness, showing that AI selections are a flexible starting point, not a locked-in decision.
Once the initial portrait is dialed in, the tutorial shifts to something that saves a lot of time when you work in series: syncing AI masks across multiple images. Nace shows how Lightroom treats the edited frame as a primary image, then copies all masks and their adjustments over to matching shots using Sync Settings in the Library module. Because the subject and composition are similar, Lightroom recalculates each AI mask on the new files, giving you a near-finished set with almost no extra work. You still have room to go back, open individual masks in the new images, and nudge things like hair shadows or background exposure if one frame needs a small correction.
The landscape section moves to a different photo and demonstrates how the dedicated Landscape mask option automatically splits a scene into sky, water, and natural ground. Nace cools and slightly greens the sky so it feels more natural, lifts exposure and clarity in the ground to bring out texture, then adds a radial gradient behind the couple to create a soft pocket of light around them. A quick subtract-subject move keeps that glow off the people if you want, and a light post-crop vignette ties the whole frame together in a few steps. You get a clear sense that you can build a full, nuanced landscape edit from only a handful of masks and global tweaks, but the video leaves plenty of room for you to see the exact settings and decisions on screen. Check out the video above for the full rundown from Nace.
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