Masking in Lightroom Classic can feel slow and clumsy when every move depends on the mouse. Keyboard shortcuts change that, letting you move faster, stay in the flow, and spend more time actually shaping the image instead of hunting through panels.
Coming to you from Terry Vander Heiden, this practical video breaks masking down into small, repeatable moves that you can trigger from the keyboard. You see how a single key press, the letter K, jumps straight into the Develop module, creates a new mask, and hands you the Brush tool without any panel diving. Vander Heiden shows how you can quickly brighten eyes or lift shadows on a face by stacking multiple masks, all created with that same K shortcut. Instead of building one huge, messy mask, you work with clean, separate adjustments that stay easy to edit later. The video walks through these steps in real-time so you can see exactly how fast this becomes once it is in your muscle memory.
The tutorial goes deeper into how you control the brush itself so it matches what you are trying to do. You already know the bracket keys change brush size, but Vander Heiden shows you how combining the Shift key with those brackets lets you change feathering on the fly, so you can jump from a soft blend to a tighter edge without touching a slider. There is also a simple trick with the mouse wheel that lets you adjust brush size while you stay focused on the subject instead of staring at the panel. When you are trying to work around eyes, hairlines, or small details, that ability to fine-tune the brush without stopping keeps the edit feeling natural. The video shows these changes in close-up, so you can see the brush outline and the feather distance shift as the shortcut keys are pressed.
Gradients and overlays get their own set of helpful shortcuts. Hitting M gives you a linear gradient to shape skies, foregrounds, or simple light falloff, and Shift M flips that to a radial gradient that works well for subtle spotlights around a face or subject. Vander Heiden also shows how the letter O toggles the mask overlay, which makes it much easier to check what you have actually selected before you start pushing sliders. Later in the video, you see how the H key cycles through different overlay display modes when you are cleaning up distractions with the Remove Tool, so your screen is not cluttered with pins when you just want to evaluate the image. There are a few extra masking and view shortcuts he uses in combination that are worth watching closely rather than just reading about in a list. Check out the video above for the full rundown from Vander Heiden.
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