often you find yourself sat there asking where exactly do i start with this and how do i get to where i want to be
what's happening guys dan debenham here in this tutorial we're going to
look at lightroom and more specifically how we go about using range masks to adjust an image
in sections rather than affecting the entire image and then trying to sort of balance out
the lights and darks so you get a sort of medium wet section a medium image so to speak you can
get the image you actually want to get by using range masks in different ways so without further
ado and without too much chatter let's dive into lightroom let's have a look and see how
we actually go about doing it as i said to you before taking the is a really important step but
more often than not when you get back and you review your image um there is effectively
bits in it that you think ah that could have been better or there are certain circumstances where
you can't expose for both sets that you need to you can't expose to the sky and for the
foreground or background or whatever and you need to adjust those things to be able to get
the image that you want from the image that you've actually got in the first place
and that is where lightroom's range masks come into effect they're a tool that is
i would say is not massively talked about but is is inevitably one of the better things in
lightroom for adjusting the um the image in parts rather than as a whole um you basically can adjust
it as what as a different bit rather than having to try and balance the lights and darks together
so we've got an image here which has got some dark areas and some light areas um and what we we
basically want to do is we want to make the image sort of balance a little bit better and maybe add
all the bits in that we feel should be there and this is all of course personal taste
but it is down to making the image that a better image than um than you've currently
taken so this image i'll put a link in the description below as to where these images
can be got from because this is not one of my images this is one from a website that lets you
tink with images and i've done this so that you can go away and get this image and you can
tinker with this image the same as i am so first things first so we've got the whole interface up
and running and it's all it's all here and we're good to go and we're getting everything we need
and we've got the whole uh system running in lightroom we've got the image there
so first thing we want to do is we want to come up to our editing uh here where it says histogram and
basic and what have you and you'll see one here that says graduated filter now we're going to
click on that and that's going to bring up a load of louder slider bars and one thing and another
and we're going to be using these to adjust the image so what we're going to do is we're going to
come across you can see we've got a little cross here we're going to come to the left hand side
it doesn't really matter which side you do but i i'm going on the left hand side to start with and
what i'm going to do is i'm going to drag a very shallow click and drag a very shallow line across
and you can see it's made no difference to the image whatsoever and that's fine i'm going to hit
o on my keyboard and that's going to bring up where that graduated filter is um that is what
it's going to affect so at the moment in time this graduated filter it's going to affect everything
that's red and you can see it's red up here it's still pink and red sort of down here it's very
red down here um but we don't want to affect the the light areas of the image we only want
to affect the darker areas of the image because that's what we're this initial graduated filter
is going to um that's what we want it to affect so we're going to come down to the bottom of here
on the right hand side and you'll see one that says range mask and it says off and what
we're going to do is we're not going to click on color or depth we're going to click on luminance
and that's going to bring up another box that you can change things with now what we're going to do
is we're only going to affect the dark areas so what i want to do is i want to drag this
slider across to the left and you can see that that range mask has got smaller that yeah red
box has got smaller and it gets smaller and smaller because you're editing out automatically
editing out the lighter areas of that image so i think that that works around for this image
it works around there and it'll work differently for each individual image that you've got
from there i can go to smoothness and what i'll do is i'll just drag the smoothness up slightly
and what that's going to do is that's going to feather this effect so it's going to feather
these lines very slightly just allowing me to um make it look a little bit a bit more real and a
bit more like it's not been edited but it has been taken as a photo i'm going to hit on the
keyboard to take that range mask selection off so you can now see the image rather than just
the redness so you can see what adjustments you're making and from that point on then
we can use these sliders here to sort of adjust just the dark areas so we're going to start with
the um exposure and i'm just going to bring the exposure up ever slightly as you can see it's
and it's not affecting this white area it's not overblowing these whites it's just affecting the
areas that were in red so we're going to do that i'm going to add a little bit of texture
i'm going to take out some of the shadows which again is going to brighten that little image up
a little bit i'm going to add in some black and the reason i'm adding black in is because
essentially the you get better blacks if you take shadow out and put black in it still affects the
shadow area it just adds a black rather than a gray and it just gives it it makes the image pop
slightly more and so we've got that now so we're all there with that and we know
that we've got where we want to be with there what i can do is i can say
let's just saturate this a little bit more so i'm going to bring the saturation up a little bit here
like so and i'm going to slightly dehaze it and that's going to bring in a little bit of the
darkness down here still so it looks like you're looking away but you're still getting the detail
you get the detail of the trees and what have you um and then what i'm going to do is i'm going to
take the highlights down slightly and this is all minor adjustments you saw tiny stuff this is not
stuff we're not trying to make humongous great adjustments to this all we're doing is we're just
trying to just tidy the image slightly so again it's very small adjustments so 16 minus 22 you
know we've got shadows down by -40 so we're by 40 so we've got you know the highlights are down by
26. we're still we were known you're exposed over by 1.3 so we're still we're still trying
to keep that as we can now we can also adjust the temperature of the image so i can make it
cooler or i could make it warmer if i wanted to i think in this instance what i'm probably
going to do is i'm going to make it slightly warmer so i'm going to go to say maybe 12
and we'll see what that looks like now what i'm going to do now is going to click off the range
mask i'm going to come down here to where it says yy and i'm going to click in here so
you can see what the differences are between the original image and the image that we're currently
editing you can see there's far more detail in the image that we're editing of course this has
varying degrees of effect on jpegs because some of that information has been stripped out of the
jpeg to make it this file size a smaller file size these of course are raw files so all that
color data and that detail data is still contained within the image so it does work to some effect on
jpegs but you'll get a greater effect if you use a raw image so next thing we want to do is we want
to do a similar sort of thing but we want to do it for the sky so i'm going to click on here again
and i'm going to then drag another one out into there i'm just going to try my hardest to
straighten up that's just my ocd okay so now we've got one set up for the sky as well we're going to
go down the same route so we're going to go to luminance again this time we're going to grab
the left hand range and we're going to move it across i'll just hit the o on my keyboard again
what we'll do is we'll move it up until we've got to a point where we feel like
we're okay and we're touching on the things we want to touch on so there we are with that
what i can do here now is i'm going to fetch the exposure down slightly because i want to
lessen the brightness of the sky so i'm going to bring the exposure down by minus one and i'm
going to add a bit of blue in there like so so i'm going to bring that blue down a little bit
and i'm going to add a bit of texture in there and i'm going to add a tiny bit of shadow
which is a bit of gray and i'm going to bring the highlights down which is going to bring in more of
that blue so i'm going to bring the highlights down a little bit and i'm going to darken
actually i'm not going to darken that i'm going to lighten the blacks a little bit
take a bit of black out and just dehaze it a little bit
okay so now that we've done that and we've got those two things set up let's just click
off them and let's just check our image again and see where we are with it so we can see we've added
a bit more color into the sky it's a bit bluer it's a little bit more warmer in this image here
and it's a little bit more detail and there's a little bit more going off and we can see what we
can do so what we can also do is there's another way this works as well so what we can do is we can
add a third one in if we want to and we know we don't need to go all the way across so what we can
do is we can just move this down here like this it's going to affect everything that goes above it
so what we can then do is come down to the range mask again go to color click the color picker
and we can either click once or we can click and drag to drag a scare square i'm going to click
and drag so i want to select an area of image of color rather than just the single point color and
what i can then do is i can then pull this in and we can make that sky even bluer if you want
to or we can go for a warmer sky and you can see it's affecting everything above this line here
um and what we want to do is we want to just make sure that we get what we need to get we'll
put that color picker back and then what we can do here is we can shift this out slightly
and we can then rotate it so that we get as much of that as possible in the blue sky
i can then come out of there and you can see we can click on each one of these and individually um
we can adjust them as you can see it basically brings up each individual one settings
so from here we've got obviously we've got some exposure to do so we can just bring the
exposure down and we can take exposure up for me i think we need to leave it roughly around there
and we'll stick some contrast in to make it a little bit darker and we'll just pull some of
the shadows out all together fetch a bit of a tiny bit of black in let's have it as five
and what we'll also do is we'll boost the x the saturation of it a little bit maybe by 10. like so
and then if we go back and we can check what our image is doing we can see we've added
a bit more blue in there so it's no longer like an overcast sky it's more of a blue sky
and it's a bit more warmer and there's a little bit more going off also what you can do the range
masks also work with this brush tool so if we go to the brush tool now what we can do is i just hit
oh my keyboard again we can see where we're going to be painting in if i just paint in here like so
so let's just paint this all in and i'm not being massively careful here and there's a reason why
i'm not going to be careful here um and that is because you can actually take it out eventually
uh once you've finished doing what you're doing so i'll just paint this all in quickly let's just
do that and get that done that's all painted in nice and quick lovely now i've gone over the edges
here and you can see this sort of area i've gone over the edges so if i hold the alt key down i get
another another brush tool with a different uh um outer feather circle which is what i last set
it out and that allows me to paint that back out so if i come down here i can come and i can paint
what i don't want to see back out so it's like no we don't definitely don't want to see all
that being adjusted all we want to adjust is we want to adjust the boardwalk effectively
so we can just come down here and just adjust that like so marvelous and then we can go into here
just generally do that okay so we've got that set up now so what we can then do
for this here also is we can adjust the saturation exposure contrast etc etc for all of these things
we can also adjust the color so we want it to be a tiny bit warmer but we also want it to be
uh a tiny bit redder so we're going to give it a sort of painted look so it's so mucky
dirty sort of feel to it we'll pull the saturation up a little bit on that and we'll de-ease it a
little bit so that it's got a little bit of um weather to it and we'll add some texture
let's pull the texture up a bit more so it doesn't like it's been well used pull some blacks in
pull some shadows in
and we'll drop the highlights of that basically so that he darkens it off a
little bit let's pull the whites out a little bit like so and then
we've just affected the color on that in essence so let's click on that again and then we can go
to range mask if we want to and we could change the color on that and we could start messing in
a similar way um from there if we want to we can also have the density of that range mask to be
full we can set the feather etc etc etc because we're using the brush tool um it gives us further
options to be able to set what we want it to be set at and that is in essence sorting out an image
after the fact um to just give it that little bit more
of a what you want the image to look like rather than to be uh the image that you actually took
and it just just allows you to adjust it in a very finite way it's the same with adjusting colors
you can adjust the colors of trees and so on and so forth individually using range masks
it's just a very powerful tool and allows you to adjust things in lightroom without having to
adjust the entire image so as you can see lightroom gives you the the ability
and really powerful tools to be able to get an image to where you want it to be despite
the the inability to take it out of time it can be difficult to balance all those things
out whilst you're actually shooting you might have a light skin a dark foreground if you um
expose for the foreground you end up blowing out the sky if you expose the sky you're darkening out
the you're underexposing the foreground and it's difficult to get those things to balance correctly
um and range masks they they allow you to adjust that image and keep the bits of the image that
you actually want without sacrificing any of the other stuff um and they allow you to do
fairly in-depth sort of edits in color and texture and clarity and all that kind of stuff but only on
a specific area in some cases on just a specific color and that just allows you to um to make sure
that you get the final image that was in your head is the image that you're actually looking
at on screen so hope hope this was useful for you and i hope that you can put it to some use when
you're out shooting and you're out taking photos and you're doing what you need to do or doing your
hobby or whatever it is that you've got and it helps you to deliver what you had in your head
so with that i will see you guys in the next one peace
you