Lightroom recently introduced a landscape masking tool designed to simplify complex edits in landscape photography. This tool can drastically improve your editing workflow and give you precise control without extra effort or complicated techniques.
Coming to you from Christian Möhrle with The Phlog Photography, this practical video walks you step-by-step through Lightroom’s new landscape masking feature using a single raw file. Möhrle begins by demonstrating essential preliminary adjustments like choosing the Adobe Landscape profile, adjusting exposure, shadows, and highlights, and fine-tuning white balance for an appealing golden hour atmosphere. He emphasizes paying close attention to the histogram throughout these initial tweaks, ensuring optimal exposure balance. Möhrle also showcases a subtle but effective glow effect achieved simply by reducing clarity and dehaze sliders, adding warmth and atmosphere without making the image overly stylized.
What makes this video especially useful is Möhrle’s clear explanation of the masking process. Lightroom’s landscape mask automatically detects various elements within an image, such as the sky, vegetation, artificial surfaces like roads, and natural terrain. Möhrle explores masking techniques for each of these selections individually, showing you precisely how to refine masks by adding or subtracting adjustments, like color range masks and linear gradients. For instance, when editing the sky, he first selects the automatic sky mask, then refines it further by subtracting unwanted elements like trees and vegetation using Lightroom’s subtract feature. He takes this even further by adding specific linear gradients to target only particular parts of the sky, adjusting brightness, darkness, and warmth separately. This method is ideal for achieving detailed yet natural-looking skies without complicated manual masking.
Beyond skies, Möhrle addresses foreground and background adjustments with equal clarity. He demonstrates the ease of creating a targeted vignette effect on roads and artificial grounds, adding depth and visual interest to the composition. Similarly, he explains enhancing details in vegetation by selectively increasing contrast, shadows, and warmth, ensuring trees and foliage appear vivid yet realistic. His precise yet straightforward approach means even intricate edits become accessible and manageable, significantly cutting down your editing time without sacrificing quality or control.
The strength of this approach lies not just in individual masking but in layering multiple targeted masks to build complex yet subtle edits. Möhrle shows how stacking masks, each with slight variations in adjustments, results in a much more nuanced final image. He also briefly covers additional editing in Photoshop for more intensive cleanup tasks and explains the benefit of smart objects for flexibility between Lightroom and Photoshop edits. His workflow moves smoothly between both programs, underscoring the practicality of combining Lightroom’s masking strengths with Photoshop’s detailed retouching tools. Check out the video above for the full rundown from Möhrle.
And if you really want to dive into landscape photography, check out our latest tutorial, "Photographing the World: Japan II - Discovering Hidden Gems with Elia Locardi!”
