BRAND NEW: Masking in Lightroom with Joe Houghton

About the session

Masking is the thing you ask us for more than anything else. It comes up in the chat, it comes up in the feedback forms, and it comes up every time somebody watches a presenter make a selection and asks how they did that so quickly.

So we are giving it a full session!

Everything else in the Develop module moves the whole photograph at once. Drag Exposure and the entire image gets brighter. Masking is how you pick one part of the picture and change only that. The sky, the subject, the water, a face, one window in a building.

Joe Houghton is taking us through all of it. Not a handful of favourites, but every masking tool in Lightroom Classic, in a logical order, with live demonstrations on his own images. Where each one works well, where it struggles, and why you would choose one over another. Two hours dedicated to one topic. There is a lot to get through and it is easier to follow along with Lightroom open in front of you, if you can!

There is also something new to cover. In August, Adobe added Feather and Edge sliders to the AI masks. Until then, when Lightroom decided where the edge of a selection went, you lived with it or you got the brush out. Now you can fix a mask after Lightroom has made it.

That sounds like a small thing. It is not. It changes the sensible way to work. Instead of fighting for a perfect selection before you start, you take the quick automatic one, make your adjustment, and blend it in afterwards. For most of us that turns masking from something we do on our best few images into something we do on all of them.

We have all been waiting a long time for those sliders. Joe will show you what to do with them.

What we will cover:

The foundations

• What a mask actually is. Think of a stencil. Lightroom paints your adjustment through the holes and leaves everything else alone. Nothing you do damages the photograph, so you can experiment freely.

• The modifier keys. Three keys do almost all the work, and most photographers never find them. They are the difference between masking feeling fiddly and masking feeling quick.

• Seeing what you have selected. The coloured overlay, how to change it, and why the default red is close to useless on a brick wall or an autumn tree.

The automatic tools

• Subject, Sky and Background. The three you will use most, and what to do when they grab the wrong thing.

• Landscape, and its separate regions for sky, architecture, water and artificial ground.

• Objects and People. Selecting one thing in a busy frame, and treating each person in a group shot on their own.

• Inverting. The trick that saves the most time. Do not brush around a tree. Select the sky and turn the selection inside out.

The manual tools

• The Brush, and the four controls that actually matter.

• Linear and Radial Gradients. How to read them, how to move them, and what they are genuinely good for.

• Colour, Luminance and Depth Range. Selecting by what a thing is rather than where it sits.

The August update

• Feather and Edge on AI masks. What each slider does, which mask types have them and which do not, and the order to use them in.

• The three fixes worth memorising. The bright halo along a darkened horizon, the cut-out look around trees and hair, and an adjustment bleeding onto the background.

Making it stick

• Combining masks. Adding, subtracting, and the intersect option hidden behind a modifier key.

• When to use which, and why. The part you cannot pick up from a video of somebody else's edit.

Who this is for? Everyone!

• If you have never opened the Masking panel, nothing here assumes you have. Joe starts from what a mask is and builds up in order.

• If you already use Select Sky on everything, this is the session that fills in the other ten tools, and brings you up to date with an August change that alters how the whole thing is best approached.

What you will need

Lightroom Classic, if you want to try things as we go. Joe is demonstrating throughout, so you are very welcome to sit and watch and have a go later with the recording. A Saturday afternoon does make it easier to have the software open alongside, if you would like to.

If you want to follow along with the new Feather and Edge sliders, you will need version 15.5 or later. You can update through the Creative Cloud app. If your Masking panel does not show those sliders, that is why.

About Joe

Joe Houghton is a photographer and teacher based in Dublin, and an Adobe Certified Professional in both Lightroom and Photoshop.

He has written twenty books, ten of them on photography, including the two volume Lightroom Classic Step by Step.

See more of his work: houghtonphoto.com

From Mark

Joe has taught more of this community than anyone. Twenty sessions of Lightroom Step by Step, twenty more of Edit With, a week of Starting Lightroom, the AI Toolbox series over the summer, and a good few standalone sessions besides. What I like about the way he teaches is the order of it. He does not show you a clever trick and move on. He takes a subject apart properly, in sequence, so that by the end you can see where each piece fits.

Masking is the right subject for that. Most of us have learned it in fragments, one technique at a time from wherever we happened to see it, which is why it works beautifully some days and not at all on others. An afternoon that goes through the lot, in order, with somebody telling you when to use which, is worth a great deal more than another fifteen minutes on YouTube.

I have been asked for this session more times than I can count. I am pleased we are finally doing it!

Tickets

£6 for the session.

£12 for the session plus Joe's written guide to masking, yours to keep.

Forty five pages, current to the August release of Lightroom Classic. Every tool step by step, with what to do when things go wrong, and a keyboard shortcut sheet laid out to print on a single side of A4. It also cross references Joe's two Step by Step books by section and page, so you can go straight to the longer version of anything you want more on.

The guide is optional. The session is the same either way.

The recording will be on the website within 24 hours and you have access for four weeks. After that it comes down. The guide does not expire, so if you want something to keep, that is the ticket to pick.

Two hours, live, with Joe answering questions as we go. Come and ask him yours!