ABOVE: here’s what I’m talking about. I lit our subject with just one flash, and her pants are at least as bright (if not brighter) than her face – the light doesn’t fall off – she’s evenly lit, which is not what we’re generally looking for (lighting-wise).

STEP ONE: In Lightroom, click on the Masking button and then click on “Select Subject” (as shown here).

STEP TWO: When you click select Subject, a red tint appears over your subject (as seen above). If you make an adjustment now, it will affect all of here, so we need to subtract the parts we don’t want to effect.

STEP THREE: To remove something from our mask, click the ‘Subtract” button just below your mask in the Masks panel (shown circled above). NOTE: if you don’t see this button, click on “Mask 1” and the Add and Subtract buttons will pop-down. Now go down into that menu and choose “Linear Gradient” (as shown above).

STEP FOUR: What we want to do is create that fall where her face stays the same, but it gets gradually darker as it moves down, so take the Linear Gradient too; click right near her neck and drag down (as shown here) and it removes her upper 1/4 from the mask (as seen above).

STEP FIVE: Now scroll down to the Tone controls and darken the exposure by dragging the Exposure a little to the left, and pull back the highlights a bit, too (dragging to the left), and that creates the falloff. You can see her pants are no longer the brightest thing – you’ve got that nice fall-off we’re looking for. Her face is the same brightness it was before, and by selecting subject first, it doesn’t affect the background (which it shouldn’t).

Above: Here’s a side-by-side view where you can see the difference. When you do this, the whole thing takes less than a minute, but it makes a world of difference lighting-wise.

Have a great Monday, everybody! (try not to think about what happened in the playoffs).

-Scott

P.S. I’m speaking at the FotoClave photography conference Feb 17-19, 2024 in San Ramon, California. I have a keynote presentation and a regular track session and aboth about travel photography, and I have a lot to share, so I hope you can check out the conference. There are loads of great instructors, including the incredible Frans Lanting. Hope you can make it Here’s the link with more details.

The post How to Easily Create Lighting “Fall Off” in Lightroom Using The New Masking Tools appeared first on Lightroom Killer Tips.

Here’s wishing you an awesome weekend – here’s hoping your team wins (unless of course, your team is Georgia). #rolltide!

-Scott

The post Lightroom Masking Tip For Better Portraits appeared first on Lightroom Killer Tips.

STEP ONE: Start by clicking the Masking button, then click “Sky” (as shown here).

STEP TWO: The red tinted area above shows you the sky as been masked. Now, just below the list of masks in the Masks panel, to the right of the word ‘Select Sky’ click on ‘Invert’ (as shown here).

STEP THREE: By turning on the Invert checkbox, it switches your masked area to the opposite of what was previous masked (you masked the sky, so inverting it selects the foreground), but in this case (and many like it), it also selected the subject (the arch). So, we have one more step to do to remove the arch from our masked area. In the Masks panel, click the ‘Subtract’ button at the bottom of the panel (if you don’t see the ‘Add’ and ‘Subtract’ buttons, click once on Mask 1 in the Masks panel and they will appear. From the list of things you can now subtract from your current mask, choose ‘Select Subject’ (as shown here).

STEP FOUR: Once you choose to subtract ‘Select Subject’ from your mask, you’re left with the foreground selected (in this case, the cobblestone street surrounding the arch). If you look closely at the resulting mask, you can see it also still has the buildings on the back left, and trees on the far right as part of the mask. If you wanted those removed as well, click on Subtract; choose ‘Brush’ from the pop-up menu and paint over those areas to remove them so only the cobblestone areas are selected.

There ya have it – pretty darn quick and easy. Here’s wishing you an awesome Monday!

-Scott

P.S. Don’t forget, the Photoshop World Conference (featuring a TON of Lightroom training sessions) is coming in just a few weeks, and we have three full days of Lightroom, Photography, and Photoshop training from a roster of the best teachers on the planet. Get the details, and reserver your spot over at photoshopworld.com

The post Select Your Foreground In 3-Click Using This Masking Technique appeared first on Lightroom Killer Tips.

Seriously, that tool kicks absolutely butt, but for some reason, it just doesn’t get the love (or the use) that it should. Give it a try, and you’ll fall in love with it – it’s that good!

We’re just four days away from my “Ultimate Photography Crash Course” full-day seminar. It’s Tuesday, August 15th; live online, or come and spend the day with me in person in Orlando at the Orange County Convention Center.

Check out this short video with the details:

Tickets and more info at kelbyonelive.com/seminar – I hope I get to see you in person there (or online).

Have a great weekend, everybody! #GoBucs!

-Scott

The post One of The Most Underrated Tools in All of Lightroom (Spoiler Alert: it’s a masking tool) appeared first on Lightroom Killer Tips.

Above: Here’s our original image, shot on a roll of gray seamless paper.

STEP ONE: Click on the Masking button (the gray circle with the white dotted lines circling it), and in the Add New Mask section at the top, click on ‘Background.’ (as shown above).

STEP TWO: The background gets a red tint over it to show which area it masked for you (as seen above).

STEP THREE: Scroll down to the Color panel and click the white swatch with an ‘X” on it to bring up the color picker (seen above).

STEP FOUR: Click anywhere inside the color pickers gradient and that color is added to the background (as seen here where I clicked on a green color).

STEP FIVE: This step gets more interesting once you’re able to pull a color from the image itself and use that for the background. To do this; click and hold inside the color picker’s gradient, and keep your mouse button held down and you can leave the picker and move right out over your image and steal a color from the image (here I dragged out to the area of his shirt on the top left and clicked to choose that blue color, and now the background is that blue, but it’s a pretty subtle blue (the square located in the gradient shows the shade of blue that was chosen). We’ll make it stronger in the next step.

STEP SIX: To make that color more intense, click that square inside the gradient and drag it upward to make the color more saturated (as seen above). So, you know the background color is going to work perfectly with the portrait because the Hue is pulled from the image. And that’s all there is to it.

Hope you found that helpful.

Coming up Next Thursday: My Live Webinar on making amazing images with your iPhone

I’m doing a live 2-hour online Webinar with the great folks at Rocky Nook (they publish my books) on “How to capture amazing shots on your iPhone” coming up on Thursday, July 13th, from 10:00 am to 12:00 pm Pacific Time (so it starts at 1:00 PM New York Time), and I’ve got lots of cool stuff to share, so I hope you can join me. Here’s the link to sign up.

Have a great weekend, everybody!

-Scott

The post Quick Easy Background Change By Pulling a Color From the Image Itself appeared first on Lightroom Killer Tips.

Pretty handy, right? You change that one little thing, and it becomes so useful.

Have a great weekend, ya’ll. Hope to catch you here next week.

-Scott

P.S. I know a lot of you use On1 Software’s plug-ins to extend what Lightroom Classic can do. If that’s you, check out the full two-day, two-track conference coming up next month on getting the most of your plug-ins and your Lightroom/On1 workflow. Here’s the link with details.

The post Way Underrated Lightroom Masking Feature appeared first on Lightroom Killer Tips.

Here’s an example:

In the image above, I want to brighten just the column in the back on the left side (it’s kind of buried a bit in the shadows), and the Masking Brush would be perfect for this, so you would click on the Masking icon, then choose ‘Brush’ from the list of masking tools that appears.

I increased the Exposure amount to +2.45 and painted over the column in the back, and you can see the result – the brightness I applied spilled over onto the wall behind it and the column in front of it. I could undo, try again with a smaller brush and paint very carefully and slowly, but this is where Auto Mask works so wonderfully well.

You turn it on by clicking the Auto Mask checkbox near the bottom of the Brush options section (as seen above). To turn it off, you can either uncheck the Auto Mask checkbox , or just press the letter “a” on your keyboard. 

Now let’s undo our last brush stroke, and try again but this time with Auto Mask turned on.

Here, I’m painting over the column in the back and brightening it at +2.45 it without brightening the other column or the wall behind (this makes me want to fix the column on the right side now). This is what I meant earlier when I talked about how Auto Mask helps you “paint inside the lines.” As long as the center of your brush cursor (the + crosshair in the center of the brush) doesn’t pass over onto the background or other column, you’ll only paint over that one column (and as you can see above, the outside edges of your brush can extend right over the background and the other column, but as long as that crosshair stays in that column, it won’t affect those other areas, and that’s what makes it so helpful).

If you make a mistake (or Auto Mask makes a mistake – hey, it happens), or you let that center crosshair stray over onto an area you didn’t mean to, you can “paint away” those areas you didn’t mean to mask. Just hold the Option key (on Mac) or the Alt key (on a Windows PC) and it temporarily changes your brush into an Erase Mask brush. Now, shrink the size of your brush (using the left and right bracket keys on your keyboard), and paint over those areas you didn’t want effected, and as you paint it removes the spillover.

OK, What’s the 10% Where It’s Not Awesome?

This sounds pretty great – why not always leave Auto Mask turned on? Well, it works great when you’re near the edges of stuff (like we were here), but if you’re using the Brush to paint over large areas, having Auto Mask on will not only show your brush’s performance because now it’s searching for edges as you paint, so it tends to “lag” a little (or a lot), but also since it’s trying to sense edges, it can also leave small gaps and not paint as smoothly over areas. So, my simple rule is this: leave it off until you get near an edge. Then press the letter “a” to toggle Auto Mask on when you need it, and when you’re done painting near the edges of things, and you’re back to large open areas, hit “a” again to turn Auto Mask back off. Easy peasy.

Hope you find that helpful. Have a great Monday everybody!

-Scott

P.S. I know a lot of you use On1 Software’s plug-ins to extend what Lightroom Classic can do. If that’s you, check out full two-day, two-track conference coming up next month on getting the most of your plug-ins and your Lightroom/On1 workflow. Here’s the link with details.

The post Lightroom’s Auto Mask Feature: 90% of the time, it’s awesome! appeared first on Lightroom Killer Tips.

Thanks, Terry! You rock!

I shared some photos from Friday’s Airshow over on my other blog today Here’s the link if you’ve got a sec.

Have a great Monday, everybody!

-Scott

The post Selection and Masking Tips & Tricks appeared first on Lightroom Killer Tips.

Here’s our original image, and you can see the large hot spots on her forehead. I think the highlight going down the bridge of her nose is a bit hot as well, so let’s at least deal with those two.

(You can download a JPEG version of this image for practice purposes only using the link below):

STEP ONE: Click on the Healing tool in the toolbar at the top of the right side panels (its icon looks like a bandage), and then in the list of healing tools, click on the only one that actually does a decent job most of the time, Content-Aware Remove (it’s the first one, as shown here). This is the only one of the three that uses Photoshop’s Content-Aware technology to do its thing, and it’s usually pretty decent (not nearly as good as Photoshop’s Healing Brush, mind you, but way better than any tool we’ve had in Lightroom before).

STEP TWO: Make your brush size larger than the hot spot on her forehead. It’s a pretty large hot spot, which will create a problem because it needs a clean area from which to sample. And, because what we’re removing is nearly the size of her forehead, the Healing tool won’t have much area to sample from, but we have what I hope will help. For now, let’s just get that brush to the size we need it (as shown here).

STEP THREE: Now go ahead and click once to remove the hot spot, and, well, it’s as I thought. Because there’s so little area left on her forehead from which to sample, it didn’t work out well (as shown here). The area it sampled from didn’t have enough of a clean skin area to make a decent removal, but all hope is not lost.

STEP FOUR: Go over to the Healing options panel (just below the Histogram on the right side panels), and click the Refresh button (you can also just press the Forward-slash key [ / ] on your keyboard), and it will choose a different area from which to sample.

STEP FIVE: Well, that’s certainly looking better, but it’s not great. We’re not done, though. Let’s try clicking that Refresh button again and see how that looks (it will pick a different area from which to sample when you click it again like this).

STEP SIX: I think this try is probably worse. So, let’s hit that Refresh button once again and see if we have better luck.

STEP SEVEN: Just when you thought it couldn’t get any worse, it did! Okay, let’s try Refresh again.

STEP EIGHT: Yikes! Well, let’s do this: keep clicking Refresh until you get back to at least something as decent as where we started back in Step Five. So, just click it a few times until you get something that you can work with.

STEP NINE: Okay, this is about as good as we’re going to get in this case, but at least I think we can work with this version.

STEP 10: Here’s the plan; go to the Healing options and drag the Opacity slider all the way to the left to zero. This will bring the Hot Spot fully back as if we had never used this Healing tool at all, as shown in the bottom image on the left (the Opacity slider here kind of works like “undo on a slider”).

STEP 11: Now, slowly drag the Opacity slider to the right (as shown below), and keep an eye on your hot-spot area as you drag. Keep dragging it until the shiny, sweaty part goes away, but the nice highlight stays in place (after all, we don’t want the highlight to go away, just the sweaty, shiny look). Here, I had to drag it to the right to around 37% (you can see the result in the image at the top of the next page). If you drag any farther, you start to see the bad sampling appear and what looks like a bruise on the right side of her forehead (it’s not a bruise; it’s that bad sampling), but this was far enough to get rid of the shiny look and still look natural.

STEP 12: Here’s the image after removing some of the shininess from her forehead while keeping the highlights in place. Now let’s do the same things for the highlight going down the bridge of her nose.

STEP 13: Your Opacity settings will still be at 37% (it’s sticky, meaning whatever setting you used last stays in place), so you can just paint a stroke down her nose and let’s see how it does.

STEP 14: Make sure you scale the brush size down to where it’s just a little larger than the highlight you want to remove on her nose and paint down the bridge of her nose (as shown here).

STEP 15: Here, you can see it did a pretty decent job the first time out. If it didn’t pick a decent sample spot, remember you can click the Refresh button and have it try again.

STEP 16: Below is a side-by-side of the before and after. No, it’s not a retouching that “hits you over the head” with a night-and-day difference, but that’s how retouching should be. The retouches should be fairly subtle but effective overall in reducing the issue, so it doesn’t distract the viewer or show the subject differently than they’d appear while standing in front of you.

Okay, that’s it for this time. Next time, we’ll continue our portrait retouching journey.

Have a great weekend, everybody!

-Scott

The post Portrait Retouching in Lightroom, Part 5 (Remove “Hot Spots”) appeared first on Lightroom Killer Tips.

Here’s a direct link to the course. Hope you’ll check it out (people are super digging it!).

Have a great Monday, everybody!

-Scott

The post Catch My New Course on Lightroom’s Masking Tools appeared first on Lightroom Killer Tips.