THIS PRODUCT GIVES YOU ACCESS TO THE RECORDING OF A LIVE SESSION. IT IS NOT A DOWNLOAD.
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.
Joe Houghton spent two hours going through all of it, live with our community. Every masking tool in Lightroom Classic, in a logical order, demonstrated on his own images. Not a handful of favourites.
Have a look before you decide
We have put a short highlight reel on YouTube. It includes Joe on where AI sits in editing, the Object mask he thinks is the most underused tool in the panel, and Depth Range sliding the plane of focus back through a photograph until you can see his reflection in the dog's eye.
👉https://youtu.be/Di76cXraJE4
What Joe covers
The foundations. What a mask actually is, the three modifier keys that make masking quick instead of fiddly, and how to see what you have selected. Joe is red-green colourblind, so he never uses Lightroom's default red overlay, and he shows you what to use instead.
The automatic tools. Subject, Sky and Background, and what to do when they grab the wrong thing. Landscape, with its separate regions for sky, architecture, water and artificial ground. Objects, and People, including how to treat each person in a group shot on their own. Along the way, the trick of selecting the subject and then duplicating and inverting it, which gives you a better background than the Background mask does.
The manual tools. The Brush and the four controls that 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 the intersect option hidden behind a modifier key.
The part that makes this one worth having now
In August, Adobe added Feather and Edge sliders to the AI masks. Photoshop has always been able to expand, contract and refine the edge of a selection. Lightroom never could. It means you can take the quick automatic mask, make your adjustment, and blend it in afterwards, instead of fighting for a perfect selection before you start.
Almost every masking tutorial you can find online was written before that release, including the masking chapters in Joe's own books. He says so himself in the session. He rebuilt this one from scratch around the current version.
What our community said
- "I've learned more in an hour this morning than years of YouTube." — Margaret, Fort Worth
- "Masking has been a dark art til now." — Ralph, Newark
- "I love the intersect tool. I think it is a game changer for skies and trees." — Gill, Billingham
- "What a fantastic talk. It shows how much Joe knows when he can change from one thing to another so quickly." — Ralph, Newark
- "Joe, you always do a fantastic job of organising the classes and the guides so they are very informative and easy to use." — Danelle, Florida
Who it is for
Both ends of the room. 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 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 follow along, and version 15.5 or later for the Feather and Edge sliders.
Add Joe's written guide
Forty five pages, current to the August release. Every tool step by step, what to do when things go wrong, a troubleshooting section, and a keyboard shortcut sheet laid out to print on a single side of A4. It cross references Joe's two Lightroom Classic Step by Step books by section and page.
This is also available for £8 on-demand. Click here to access
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.
One last thing
This was a single session rather than a series, and it is not scheduled to run again. Masking sat at the top of our request list for a very long time before we gave it a whole afternoon, and the recording is the only way to sit in on it now.
