THIS IS THE GUIDE ONLY - NOT THE WORKSHOP ITSELF!
DOWNLOAD TO KEEP. A 45 PAGE PDF, YOURS FOR GOOD, WITH NO EXPIRY.
Masking is the biggest jump in editing control you will make in Lightroom Classic. 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.
These are the written notes from Joe Houghton's masking session for our community, and they were built to be worked from rather than read once. They are current to Lightroom Classic version 15.5, released in August 2026, which matters more than it sounds. That release added Feather and Edge sliders to the AI masks, so you can now fix a mask after Lightroom has made it. Almost every masking tutorial you can find was written before that change, including the masking chapters in Joe's own books, and he says so himself in section 11.
What is in it
Every masking tool in Lightroom Classic, taken in order, with the same four questions asked of each one: how to do it step by step, where it works well, what it is genuinely good for, and where it struggles.
Subject, Sky and Background. Landscape, with its separate regions for sky, architecture, water and artificial ground. Objects. People, including how to treat each person in a group shot on their own. The Brush and the four controls that actually matter. Linear and Radial gradients, and how to read the three lines. Colour, Luminance and Depth Range, for selecting by what a thing is rather than where it sits. Then combining them, adding, subtracting and intersecting.
Section 11 is the new one. What Feather and Edge each do, a table of which mask types have them and which do not, when to reach for one rather than the other, and how the whole sensible order of work changes now that a selection can be fixed after the fact.
The parts you will come back to
A troubleshooting section written as the sentences people actually say. My mask has an obvious halo around it. The edge looks cut out, like a bad collage. Select Sky grabbed the reflection in the water. I have got twelve masks and no idea what they do. The Depth Range option is greyed out. My AI masks vanished when I opened the catalogue on another machine. Eleven of them, each with the fix.
A keyboard shortcut sheet laid out to print on a single side of A4, Mac key first and Windows second, and worth pinning up next to the screen.
A cross-reference to Joe's two Lightroom Classic Step by Step books by section and page number, so you can go straight to the longer version of anything you want more on. It also tells you where the books do not cover something, which is the more useful half.
Something unusual, and the reason we are pleased with this one
Masking shortcuts are badly documented, including by Adobe, and most written guides quietly paper over that. This one does not. It sorts everything it tells you into three groups: what is verified across two or more independent sources, what comes from a single good source and should be treated as likely rather than certain, and what is genuinely not settled yet because the release is weeks old and the published accounts disagree.
Seventeen references are listed at the back with links. It also corrects an error that sits in Joe's own book, in a widely read Adobe evangelist's article, and in dozens of blog posts, nearly four years after Adobe changed the shortcut in question.
We have not seen another handout do that, and once you have used one that does, the ones that simply assert everything read differently.
Who it is for
Both ends of the room. If you have never opened the Masking panel, nothing here assumes you have. It starts with what a mask actually is, using a stencil, and builds up in order. If you already use Select Sky on everything, this fills in the other ten tools and brings you up to date with a change that alters how the whole thing is best approached.
You will want Lightroom Classic to work along with it, and version 15.5 or later for section 11.
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. He has been presenting for our community since 2021.
In his own words, from the opening page: "I've delivered well over a thousand online sessions since 2020, and masking is the topic where I see the biggest lightbulb moment. People arrive thinking it's an advanced feature for retouchers. They leave using Select Sky on every landscape they own."
Please note
If you booked the live session with the guide included, this is the same document and you already have it. There is no need to buy it twice.
