Adobe Masking in Lightroom- great new update for those using Lightroom

[Dale D]

I have been on here before touting this presenter, who I have been following for many years. He is a great teacher and easy to follow. For those of you who use Lightroom (and Photoshop) the new masking upgrade is really terrific. We can all use it for all of this sunsets, sunrises, and other high dynamic range images to open up the dark foregrounds where the señor is reading the. bright sky. Here is a link to Colin Smith's tutorial.

 

[tlswift58]

I have been on here before touting this presenter, who I have been following for many years. He is a great teacher and easy to follow. For those of you who use Lightroom (and Photoshop) the new masking upgrade is really terrific. We can all use it for all of this sunsets, sunrises, and other high dynamic range images to open up the dark foregrounds where the señor is reading the. bright sky. Here is a link to Colin Smith's tutorial.

Sadly - Adobe doesn't upgrade my version of Lightroom 6 (non-subscriber). There is a "shadows" tool already built in that helps with darker spots like you mention. At least it's in my version of LR.

 

[Dale D]

Obviously, Adobe is in business to make money. I am no defender of Adobe! I hate the subscription business model! But that is the way Adobe can continue to grow, develop and improve. I subscribe and am glad that I do because Adobe has dramatically improved Photoshop and Lightroom and there is barely a week that goes by without an update, upgrade, or amazing improvement. Now they have a new and amazing masking tool, and the neural filter is also amazing. In addition, I do not hesitate a millisecond to call for Adobe support. I have done support calls at lest 5 times this year. The support staff (based in India with thick accents) is excellent, and invaluable to me. They have helped me tremendously with making my videos with Premiere Pro.

So I guess what I am saying is, "you get what you pay for." I am sure this argument has been going for a very long time.

Dale
Miami

 

[tlswift58]

Obviously, Adobe is in business to make money. I am no defender of Adobe! I hate the subscription business model! But that is the way Adobe can continue to grow, develop and improve. I subscribe and am glad that I do because Adobe has dramatically improved Photoshop and Lightroom and there is barely a week that goes by without an update, upgrade, or amazing improvement. Now they have a new and amazing masking tool, and the neural filter is also amazing. In addition, I do not hesitate a millisecond to call for Adobe support. I have done support calls at lest 5 times this year. The support staff (based in India with thick accents) is excellent, and invaluable to me. They have helped me tremendously with making my videos with Premiere Pro.

So I guess what I am saying is, "you get what you pay for." I am sure this argument has been going for a very long time.

Dale
Miami

For those that use it all the time and use it for a living - the subscription model is a great thing. I use LR maybe a couple of times a week, if that often - all depends on my photo shoots that week or month.

I do have other "photo" packages I use like ones from Topaz that are a yearly based update subscription model.

If my "old" version has "shadows" in it - then the "new" tool you mention is not really new. Hopefully greatly improved though.

 

[SethB]

Wow. Adobe extending these AI-based selection methods to Lightroom is going to keep me in LR more. Fewer reasons to go out to Photoshop is a very good thing when dealing with tens or hundreds of photos from a shoot.

And, masks as editable layers with a floating/dockable layer palette? Wow again. I’m racking my brain to think of why I would need to take the tough stills to PS. The only thing I’m coming up with is editing of 360-spherical panoramas… has Adobe brought that over to LR too?

Thanks @Dale D

 

[Jagerbomb52]

 

[SethB]

Good demo here, and a GREAT summary of what it means to many professional workflows towards the end, around 7:30. It’s when you’re dealing with cutting down hundreds of shots to tens of possibles to a few selects that this AI masking really shows value for me.

 

[brett8883]

I totally agree that it’s a game changing update. Select sky and select subject are miraculously accurate.

They still need to add all the global edit options to the selective edits though. Things like curves and selective color edits should be able to be applied selectively. It’s so close to being perfect it is frustrating. Also they need to allow you to change density after you make the selection. Just little things that would make it full featured and can’t be that hard to implement.

 

[adcimagery]

I totally agree that it’s a game changing update. Select sky and select subject are miraculously accurate.

They still need to add all the global edit options to the selective edits though. Things like curves and selective color edits should be able to be applied selectively. It’s so close to being perfect it is frustrating. Also they need to allow you to change density after you make the selection. Just little things that would make it full featured and can’t be that hard to implement.

I've been testing the feature pretty extensively, and I have mixed feelings. For some shots, the new masking is clearly better. For many images though, it's still just easier and faster to jump over to Photoshop. I don't know if Lightroom will get to the same level of PS, or if it even should. Instead, I'd like to see PS adopt a better file saving/opening paradigm to better function with edits of 10 or 20 images, rather than just 1.

 

[Dale D]

Lightroom, to me at least, has always been a cataloging function and bulk processing software with global adjustments. Since they have now added focal, or local adjustments and masking, it is closer to Photoshop, but in my work, nothing compares to the exacting local adjustments of Photoshop, and nothing compares to the bulk processing of Lightroom. I only use Lightgroom for my timelapses because I use LRTimelapse5 software. I cannot think go a single image I have processed on a stand alone bass in Lightroom.

Dale
Miami

 

[brett8883]

I've been testing the feature pretty extensively, and I have mixed feelings. For some shots, the new masking is clearly better. For many images though, it's still just easier and faster to jump over to Photoshop. I don't know if Lightroom will get to the same level of PS, or if it even should. Instead, I'd like to see PS adopt a better file saving/opening paradigm to better function with edits of 10 or 20 images, rather than just 1.

The only issue is that with Photoshop you are editing on a destructive serial basis(order matters) whereas with Lightroom you are working on a non-destructive parallel basis (order doesn’t matter) to the original raw data. To preserve data integrity you’d want to do as much as possible in Lightroom before bringing into PS especially color adjustments. As soon as you bring it into PS you lose that connection to the original raw data.

 

[Dale D]

The only issue is that with Photoshop you are editing on a destructive serial basis(order matters) whereas with Lightroom you are working on a non-destructive parallel basis (order doesn’t matter) to the original raw data. To preserve data integrity you’d want to do as much as possible in Lightroom before bringing into PS especially color adjustments. As soon as you bring it into PS you lose that connection to the original raw data.

You can easily edit non-destructively in Photoshop. Just make a copy (CTRL+J) to edit from, convert to a smart object. See attached.I have done both. Layer 1 is a copy (duplicate layer), and the first layer (0) has smart object icon
embedded in the layer.

Dale

 

[brett8883]

You can easily edit non-destructively in Photoshop. Just make a copy (CTRL+J) to edit from, convert to a smart object. See attached.I have done both. Layer 1 is a copy (duplicate layer), and the first layer (0) has smart object icon
embedded in the layer.

Dale

View attachment 139422

But you can only make one mask per smart object and edits are still on a serial basis so it doesn’t solve the selective edit dilemma.

 

[brett8883]

The object selection tool in PS would be a nice addition to LR I’ll give you that but I do find the auto selection brush in LR to faster to work with most of the time.