A Quick Guide to the Range Mask, One of Lightroom's Lesser Known Useful Features

Lightroom has all sorts of lesser known features, and some of them can save you a ton of time in your editing workflow. This quick and helpful video will show you the range mask in Lightroom.

Coming to you from Signature Edits, this quick and useful video will show you the range mask feature in Lightroom. The range mask is a great feature, as it allow you to apply edits that only appear in a certain range of luminance values, thus enabling you to easily add dehaze and bump the saturation of a bright sky, for example, as opposed to carefully painting it in along the horizon line. When you're using it in luminance mode, take advantage of the smoothness slider as well. This allows you to fade the adjustment in and out so it doesn't have a hard transition line. It's similar to the effect you get when using a soft-edge brush. You can also use the color option to mask in adjustments based on different color values, though I generally find I use the luminance masking much more often. Check out the video above for the full rundown and give it a try yourself! 

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Alex Cooke is a Cleveland-based portrait, events, and landscape photographer. He holds an M.S. in Applied Mathematics and a doctorate in Music Composition. He is also an avid equestrian.

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2 Comments

Nice and succinct. Thanks!

You had me at seeing a 2:23 total length. And the content was very helpful to boot. Thanks.