Lightroom: A first look at the new masking options

There had been rumours of a major change in Lightroom and this week we got them, with new masking options bringing alterations to some tried and trusted working practices, writes Andrew James. In this video, I’ll run through the basics of the new look options, and explore some of the improved functionality. At this stage there will still be new learning to come as we get to grips with everything that the new features can do, but this first look video will help to get you started. The video is approximately 19 minutes long.

Published in Imaging Skills
16 Comments
  1. Cheers Andrew, very timely and useful

  2. Thanks Andrew, and for explaining ‘intersect’ which had me puzzled.

    • Well I’ve explained it in as far as I can work it out so far Paul. Still have some more work to do on it before I can say how much use ‘intersect’ is going to be. If you discover anything, let me know. 😊

  3. Very useful thank you AJ (:O)))))). Heading for my update now ….

  4. That was very timely. Just edited a couple of lion shots and used the select subject – worked a treat. Thanks

  5. Ho! Ho! Ho!, and a Rottle of Bum. Hic! So, the new LR updates could not be installed on my old Mac OS, so I had to update to OS Monterey …..Yikes! Not sure that it was going to happen or, if so, to actually work on my MacPro 2013 thingywotsit …. Mmmmm: apparently it is now all done, and it appears to work with the first bits tried out; BUT I will not jump the gun – especially if it is a Cold Weapon! As always: Finguss Crosst!

    • Thanks AJ, never got as far as intersect so I see now the possibilities of use, a definite work in progress approach!

  6. And there is the first of the “issues” with upgrade to Monterey : PhotoMechanic 5 will not work as it is 32-bit, and it tells me I need the 64-bit version PM6, for the princely sum of $179 US. Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!

  7. Question: who uses PhotoMechanic, and what is a good equivalent to it for Ingesting pics from cards
    and all that PM5/6 does?

    • I’ve never used it Jerry – I just use LR for sorting, keywording, rating and deleting.

    • Hi Jerry, I use it loads, primarily because of the nature of live shooting means you end up with loads of shots and you need to cull them quickly without importing them all into LR. I find it very good for that, but I don’t use most of the other features such as tagging and organisation, I use LR for this instead. If I wasn’t using LR, then I would use PM as my main image ‘catalogue’ and there is a ‘pro’ version that does things similar to LR but without the editing. For ingesting you could use something free like RawTherapee which works on everything – Window, Mac and Linux – but that’s a RAW processor not an ingest and cataloguing tool. The main thing I like about PM is its speed when dealing with a ton of images – I can just tag the ones I want and then cull the rest without having to process them at all.

  8. Thanks AJ – that’s been very helpful…

  9. Great over view of a very significant update to Lr. Some has been driving me crazy but have got a ‘solution’ to a buggy thing. Have a rhino that is also in the sky but want to bring a linear grad down over the sky and it comes over the rhino , pain in the arse to brush it out BUT you can choose subtract and then pick subject-bingo. So much in this update.

  10. Thanks for this AJ. Had a bit of a play, and it’s going to take some time/practice to get used to it. Hopefully the muscle memory will kick in over the RAW course this week.

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