Lightroom Classic offers tools that can elevate your photo editing significantly, but some of the most powerful features remain underused. One of these tools, intersecting masks, allows you to refine your edits with precision. It’s versatile, easy to use, and adaptable to almost any photography genre, from portraits to landscapes.
Coming to you from Gareth Evans with Park Cameras, this insightful video focuses on how intersecting masks can improve your workflow. Using a portrait as an example, Evans demonstrates how to add depth and contrast by brightening one side of a subject’s face while darkening the other. Instead of letting the adjustments spill onto the background, he applies a radial gradient and intersects it with a subject mask. This ensures the edit only affects the subject, maintaining clean, controlled adjustments. This technique not only adds drama but also gives you the freedom to fine-tune the mask further.
For landscapes, Evans shows how intersecting masks can transform your skies without affecting other parts of the image. By creating a linear gradient to darken the sky and intersecting it with a sky mask, you can apply edits specifically to the sky, regardless of how far the gradient extends. This approach provides flexibility to feather, brighten, or darken the area as needed, allowing you to enhance the image’s mood without impacting foreground elements.
The video also explores combining masks with luminance range settings. Evans uses a linear gradient intersected with a luminance range mask to target bright areas, such as light streaming through a window. This lets you adjust exposure, warmth, or other attributes in those specific areas while keeping the rest of the frame untouched. The result is a natural, polished effect that looks thoughtfully edited.
Intersecting masks make complex edits manageable, giving you control without overcomplicating the process. Whether you’re highlighting a subject, refining a sky, or enhancing light, this tool can help you achieve professional-level results with ease. Check out the video above for the full rundown from Evans.