Published on October 30, 2021
The Adobe Lightroom Classic update offers quite some new features for masking. In this blog I’ll show 2 of these new features: the option to auto select a sky and the option to auto select a subject.
Auto select sky
The first feature is the one to automatically select a sky. If you want to download the photo I used for this explanation, click here.
Open the masking panel and select ‘select sky‘.
Lightroom will now automatically mask your sky. Select ‘show overlay‘ to see the masked area. You can also change the color of the mask overlay (it’s red by default).
You can adjust the mask by clicking ‘Add’ to add areas to the mask or ‘Subtract’ to erase areas. You can use all the masking options for this.
If instead of the sky, you want to select everything but the sky, click ‘invert‘. You’ll see that the sky is now no longer masked.
And that’s how you automatically select a sky. You can then start editing your masked areas.
Auto select subject
This process is pretty similar to the one to auto select a sky. If you want to download the photo I used, click here.
Open the masking panel and select ‘select subject‘.
Lightroom will now select your subject. Click ‘show overlay‘ to see the masked area. Click ‘Add’ to add areas to the mask or ‘Subtract’ to erase areas. Again you can select all the different kind of masking options to do this (as shown above in the sky masking explanation).
To invert your selection, you can also right click on the mask pin. You can also duplicate, hide or delete your masked area by right clicking the pin. Inverting your masked area in this case means the background will get masked (and your subject is not masked). This is a good method to use when you want to blur your background.
And that’s how you automatically select a sky or subject. I really like these new features and I’m sure I’ll be using them a lot! If you want to know more about editing, check out the list below or take a look at my YouTube channel.
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