Are You Tapping Into the Full Power of Adobe Lightroom’s Masking Tools?

Adobe Lightroom has continued to improve as various tools inside the software have matured. One area in Lightroom that has made tremendous advances is masking, but are you maximizing the masking options in your photo editing to take advantage of these impressive features?

Over the past few years, the ability to use Adobe Lightroom for more photo editing has increased. One area that Adobe has continued to enhance is masking, the ability to perform targeted adjustments on your images for more subtle and precise effects.

In this video, Brian Matiash walks the viewer through a very subtle but transformative edit to a pair of photos using the precision of the masking tools in Lightroom. Matiash demonstrates how to use a general mask to target an area and then apply several other options to the mask to further refine the selection to be applied to just what you want targeted.

Using these techniques, Matiash cleverly pairs the precision of the masks, adding just a little bit of glow behind a subject to help it stand out from an otherwise low-light scene. The glow technique alone is a handy trick for a subtle but powerful editing technique for landscape and portrait photographers alike.

While I feel pretty comfortable with the masking options in Lightroom, Matiash’s video helps show just how effective and powerful Lightroom masking can be. I am also looking forward to trying a new way to use an old tool for the subtle glow effect he demonstrates in the video.

Jeffrey Tadlock's picture

Jeffrey Tadlock is an Ohio-based landscape photographer with frequent travels regionally and within the US to explore various landscapes. Jeffrey enjoys the process and experience of capturing images as much as the final image itself.

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