Hey guys! Ryan here at signature edits and today I am beyond pumped to show you
this incredible Lightroom feature. It's called Auto masking and it changed my
life, and I think it's going to change yours too. Let's do it.
So what is auto masking, and how is it going to change my life Ryan? Well I'm
glad you asked fine sir madam. It's going to change your life because it is going
to save you so much time when you're editing and it is going to allow you to
do things in Lightroom you had no idea you could even do before. So first what
is auto masking? If you've ever used your adjustment brush you may have
noticed this little checkbox down here and it says auto mask. That's basically
Lightroom's intelligent mode for when you are using your adjustment brushes so
let's go down here and say I'm going to draw on this path okay I've pressed o
and that's actually what's going to reveal where I've drawn. And as I'm
drawing I've got the auto mask feature on and you'll see that it's naturally
picking up for the most part the lines of contrast between this pavement and
these little sidewalls the reason it's not doing the perfect
job is because the sidewalls are a pretty similar color and consistency and
auto mask is not super great all the time at detecting that. So if I go here
it should just sort of mask out this stone from the rest of the castle and
that is the basic way of using Auto mask. It can be super helpful in certain
situations so for instance if I go over to this image here I could possibly use
auto mask to make a little mask on the sky without necessarily getting on to
these mountains and stones right here. Okay so that's how I would use auto mask
in this situation and it's very handy because now I can take the exposure on
the sky and take it way down for instance okay that's how I would use
auto mask before and this is something that is super helpful but what is going
to blow your mind is there is an easier better faster more
efficient and more effective way that will save you so much time and allow you to do
things you never thought you could do before or if you did know you could do
them before would just take you forever so you would never do it okay so what am
I talking about well take a look at this first I'm going to zoom out on this
photo and then I'm going to take my adjustment brush and I'm going to take
the size all the way up so it's gigantic okay now the reason I'm doing this is
because I don't have to click once and the auto mask feature is automatically
going to detect the area I click this little center spot of
this whole adjustment brush and it's going to detect the color and the
brightness of that particular area in the image and it's automatically going
to mask out everything that it thinks matches up with that color in that
brightness this is amazing because as you can see with one click I've gone
ahead and for the most part accurately masked out all of this background from
the photo without masking out my subjects now if I for whatever reason
need to erase a little bit of the mask I just hit alt and that'll toggle to the
eraser and I can just draw on his sweater where I don't actually want the
mask to affect so literally in one click rather than having to go through and
draw manually onto this entire image I have masked out the background from my
subjects what's so awesome about this is if I turn off oh I can now do whatever I
want I can take my exposure way down I can take away up I can do all sorts of
crazy things and effects or I can just be more subtle I can add a little bit
more focus to my subjects maybe a little bit more clarity to the background if I
want to bring out that texture there a little bit of saturation without
affecting any of the skin tones this is amazing so take a look at this this is
before and this is after all from one simple mask that takes one second let's
look at another example okay so you know we've got this photo we're going to zoom
out by selecting the 1 to 8 ratio or if you have a bigger screen you can use
something else and then I'm going to let's say I want to darken down these
mountains in the back or lighten them up okay I hit the auto mask and it's done a
pretty good job right out of the gate I press alt and I can just erase from down
here and just like that it's already gotten this whole line here is
automatically masked and it's done a very good job save me a ton of time so
now all I have to do press o again and I can darken them up BAM just like that or
maybe I lighten them up whatever I feel like doing
you know let's take it one step further let's take the auto mask make a new mask
and we're going to click these bushes let's say I want to bring out the blue
in these bushes a lot more okay one click and it didn't work so well why is
that well because the area that I like clearly was not a specific enough
color to mask out that area of the bushes effectively how do I fix this
well it's actually pretty easy I just drag it on to another area of the bushes
that hopefully has a more specific color range and matches up with the bushes but
not with all of the grass so that is looking pretty good right there now I
can just press alt erase the other parts of the image that I don't want the mask
on especially my friend here and just like that pres OA gehen and let's bring
the white balance down saturation up and we've got the bluest bushes there ever
were on the planet of Mars okay we can do all sorts of crazy effects if we want
to let's move on and look at some more practical applications okay so here's
another one let's say that I want to just change the color of her sweater
well all I have to do grab my mask click on a part of her sweater oh okay
her eyes were picked up and this little background I'm going to press alt just a
race out of the background race off her eyes now we can have fun let's take this
and we can make it way more blue if we want to bring the saturation out maybe
bring the brightness up just a little bit and just like that we go from this
to this so simple so fast and it took no time in no effort it's amazing let's
keep looking okay so let's take this adjustment layer click right there press
oh yeah it's masked out our entire sky so now we can get our sky back in just
one click instead of having to manually paint on there one stroke at a time is
before rather here's before and here's after just like that about two seconds
what would normally take me 10 minutes of painting in Lightroom are you seeing
how amazing this is let's take you one step further still
okay let's go for this van this time okay we've got the color of the van
we're masked out very easy in this case because the color is very specific to
the van now what we can do is we can take our white balance town we can take
it up we can maybe add some magenta in there we can make it the most saturated
blue bus you've ever seen we can Arkana make it a navy bus or we can even
use this color function which is really really cool now in this case because the
bus is already blue we're going to the van not a bus what are you doing Ryan
we're going to have a hard time making it something like red because red is the
polar opposite and it's just not gonna happen
but we can make it into a green bus let's say so let's go for a lime green
bus the greenest bus there ever was fiddle with our white balance just a
little bit here and just like that in about two seconds I've gone and I've
done a very complicated mask that would take a long time to paint manually just
like that you can make your bus green right all your dreams have come true you
can make your buses green from here on out how amazing is that okay
this one is a really crazy example that I absolutely love okay take a look at
this let's say that I love my castle but I want to bring out some of the
saturation in the trees I want them to be more bright I want them to feel you
know lovely and whimsical okay well I could try and bring the saturation up
but the problem is it's going to affect the castle the people everything in the
image not just the greens so let's take this back let's reset our vibrance and
our saturation and let's do our trick here let's go to 1 over 8
let's click somewhere in the green press our Oh keys so that we're going to see
what we're doing and just like that now let's say that the first mask didn't
work out so well I can just drag this to a different point drag it around on the
green and Lightroom is going to continue autumn a skiing and saying you know ok
colors in this area colors in this area so let's say right around here seems to
be pretty good I don't want to get the castle in the mask right so that has
saved me a ton of time if I want to I can then make my brush a little smaller
and just go over these areas that are really easy to paint over BAM so in 2
seconds I've done a very complicated mask now I can take my saturation way up
take my vibrance take my saturation way up I can take my exposure up a little
bit if I want to get some more green in those plants I could even add green in
the white balance I could warm things up if I want it to be more of a warm feel
and we have gone from here
from here to here isn't that incredible with very very minimal being affected in
the castle two people everything looks natural and that is the hardest thing to
do when you're editing a photo is to get it to look amazing but also get it to
look like it wasn't really edited like that's the goal is that your edits are
kind of seamless they just blend in without really standing out so let's do
one more and I'm just gonna show you another thing you can do here we can
grab our brush make it a huge again and let's say that I want to just maximize
the dynamic range in this image well this is another handy feature here we
can click this highlight and Lightroom is automatically hopefully not in this
case it looks like going to it should oh
you know why it's not working because I switched to adjustment brush B and that
doesn't have Auto mask enabled so there you go if it's not working for you that
might be why now click on this area of highlight there we go now it's
automatically masked out these individual highlights that are kind of
being blown out to be honest and we're going to do one more maybe on her pants
here where it's bright perfect so now we've done a super complicated mask in
two seconds press o again let's make this a little bigger and I can vary
slightly maybe bring down my highlights now obviously some of these were lost in
the photo so there's not a ton of room but just like that we've gone from here
to here something they'll be super complicated to do if you're doing this
manually like let's say I was trying to do it manually right I would have to
make my brush a lot smaller and then I'm going to be like okay doo-doo-doo turn
off auto mask here we go just going to paint and it's going to be great
oh man that's that's literally impossible right I'd have to make it
super small and maybe turn my feather up and my flow down so that I could slowly
paint on here and even my slow painting with the most detail I can do is still
not going to be as good as if I were to delete this turn on my auto mask
zoom out here make my brush nice and big and just select that one point hello
oh it's cuz my flow is all the way down there we go and just select that one
point and bam it's done just like that now I can come in and I can finesse it
from there that's one thing that manually you can do is just add that
extra little bit of accuracy in detail but you can see how much time this saves
you you know like let's say we want to adjust her jacket so let's just click
here and bam in one click we've got the jacket do a second click and Lightroom
is actually going to add to that mask so we're not just going after this color
range now we're also going after this color range perfect so press again and
let's brighten this jacket up let's take some color let's maybe try and make it
let's try to make this jacket red mmm isn't that nice the best red navy jacket
you've ever seen in your life so I hope this was helpful for you honestly this
is a game-changer for me because what I normally wouldn't have time to do I
would never have time to go through and just paint out her jacket here if I was
editing a wedding or an engagement session that sort of thing but when it's
so fast that all I have to do is one click and done I can actually do that I
can take my photos to the next level so that is it for our tutorial today this
is the Lightroom trick that has changed my life and rocked my world and I
believe it is going to do the same for you I can't wait to hear how you use it
and how much it helps you please if it did leave me a comment below I want to
hear from you and make sure to hit that like button don't forget to subscribe
for more great stuff and I will see you in the next video stay awesome