Editing Landscapes Faster With Lightroom’s Latest Update

Adobe has just released a Lightroom update with a new landscape masking feature designed to streamline your editing workflow. If you frequently edit landscape photos, this update is worth exploring for its practical improvements.

Coming to you from Gareth Evans with Park Cameras, this informative video breaks down exactly how Lightroom’s landscape mask simplifies complex editing tasks. Lightroom now automatically identifies and categorizes key elements in your landscape photos, such as skies, mountains, water, vegetation, and architecture, creating precise masks instantly. Evans illustrates this clearly with multiple photo examples, demonstrating how easily you can isolate each area for targeted adjustments, such as altering shadows, clarity, or color temperature without manually tracing each section. If you often find yourself struggling to isolate tricky elements like coastline cliffs or building outlines, you'll immediately recognize the potential time savings. While automatic masking isn’t always flawless—occasionally grabbing unintended elements like a sign or blending coastal areas with mountains—Evans shows how quickly these minor inaccuracies can be corrected.

One particularly useful aspect Evans highlights is the feature's flexibility through intersecting masks. By combining landscape masks with radial or linear gradients, Lightroom lets you create highly customized adjustments effortlessly, refining edits down to precise locations. For instance, Evans combines a gradient mask with a mountain selection to enhance clarity and brightness selectively on coastal cliffs, ensuring adjustments don’t spill over onto adjacent water or sky. This precision can significantly enhance the realism and visual appeal of your photos without tedious brushwork. Similarly, the ability to apply gradients that intersect with water masks lets you naturally adjust exposure and warmth, adding depth without affecting other areas.

Evans further explores how this masking capability adapts to various photo types, not just traditional landscapes but also images with architecture or vegetation as dominant elements. In a photo featuring buildings, trees, and pathways, Lightroom identified distinct masks for each component. This functionality simplifies editing, allowing separate treatments to enhance clarity in architectural details or adjust the warmth in greenery, delivering results that would otherwise require meticulous manual selection. Evans also uses a challenging nighttime scenario featuring the northern lights, highlighting how quickly these masks can resolve complex white balance issues caused by mixed artificial and natural lighting. Such examples underscore the value of this update beyond conventional daytime landscape photography. Check out the video above for the full rundown from Evans.