Lightroom’s masking tools are essential for emphasizing different parts of your photos. This helpful video tutorial highlights the practical steps to improve your images by using these tools.
Coming to you from Christian Möhrle - The Phlog Photography, this insightful video covers the basics of using Lightroom's masking tools. The process starts with correcting lens distortions. Wide angle lenses often distort horizons, making them look curved. By adjusting the distortion slider in the lens corrections panel, you can straighten these lines, giving a more natural look to your images.
Next, Möhrle demonstrates the importance of choosing the right profile for your image. Switching from Adobe Color to Adobe Neutral can help balance the highlights and shadows, especially in high-contrast scenes. This adjustment ensures that the bright areas are not too overwhelming and the dark areas retain detail. By carefully tweaking exposure, highlights, and shadows, you can achieve a well-balanced base for further edits.
After setting the base, the video dives into adding warmth to the image. Adjusting the white balance to introduce a sunrise feeling makes the image more appealing. Slightly increasing the temperature and reducing clarity and dehaze creates a soft, glowing effect. This technique helps in blending the different elements of the image seamlessly, making the overall scene more cohesive.
Möhrle then moves on to the main focus: using masks to enhance specific areas. Starting with a linear gradient for the sky, he reduces highlights to make the sky more vibrant. This technique avoids the common issue of affecting other parts of the image by using a precise selection. For the foreground, a radial gradient is used to add detail and make the rocks pop. Increasing clarity and texture in these areas draws the viewer's eye to the main subject.
The video continues by adjusting the background using a linear gradient and subtracting the sky to focus on the mountain range. This method ensures that the ocean remains unaffected, and the background gets a balanced exposure. Möhrle adds warmth to the mountains to match the overall tone of the image.
To finalize the masking process, Möhrle uses luminance and color range masks for precise adjustments. These masks target specific colors and brightness levels, allowing detailed enhancements. Check out the video above for the full rundown from Möhrle.
