This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
Range selection for specific control
Lightroom’s ability to adjust localized color with brushes and gradients has really minimized the amount of work you need to do in Photoshop. That said, neither program had a quick way to localize adjustments based on color and luminosity. With the 2018 release of Lightroom, though, users now have the ability to use color and luminosity controls in all of the local adjustment tools, taking your editing that much further.
Select the Jade-1 image and use the Adjustment Brush to paint over an area where you want to make a localized adjustment (in this case, the sky). To see this adjustment better, select Show Selected Mask Overlay in the toolbar below the image preview. Make sure you also have Auto Mask selected near the bottom of the Adjustment Brush panel as you paint over the sky—you’ll find it easier and faster to get all of it selected without selecting the mountains or water.
Turn off the overlay, and decrease the exposure of the sky area by –2. While this adjustment may be a little too harsh, it does offer a good way for you to see how the effect works. Using this localized adjustment, I wanted to darken the blue in the sky, but the underexposure makes the clouds look really dark.
Although this is something that we are doing with an Adjustment Brush, you’ll run into the same problem with Linear and Radial Gradients, as well. Lightroom now offers three ways for you to limit these adjustments with range masking:
Luminance (another word for brightness) allows you to select specific areas based on the luminance range you select.
Color allows you to create a selection mask based on the colors that you sample within the mask area.
The Depth Range option was released in October 2018. It allows you to select an area based on depth range information.
NOTEAccording to the Adobe website: Depth Range Mask is available for only those photos that have embedded depth map data. As of this writing, this is limited to HEIC files captured on Apple iPhone 7+, 8+, X, XS, XS MAX, and XR using Portrait mode in the built-in iOS camera app. If there is no available depth info for an image, the Depth option is disabled in the Range Mask menu.
Select Luminance from the Range Mask menu near the bottom of the panel, and select Show Luminance Mask to see it in action. The areas that are affected have the red overlay. We’ll need to limit the effect to just the darker areas of the blue sky.
The Luminance Range Selector (it looks like a big eyedropper) is a great way to get the precise luminance values you are looking for. Click the tool to activate it, then click the dark blue portion of the sky in the upper right.
The Range slider has two knobs that dictate the luminance range affected. Dragging the left one to the right eliminates the darker portion of the range; dragging the right one to the left eliminates the whiter portion of the range.
The Smoothness slider adjusts how smooth the falloff is at either end of the selected luminance range. Drag the Range and Smoothness sliders until only the dark cloud areas are covered in the red overlay.
With the new range selection created, adjust Exposure to –1.48, Shadows to 60, and Saturation to 39. Although this increases the amount of color in the sky, the whites in the clouds are not affected.
You also can use Color in the Range Mask menu to isolate and apply adjustments to a specific color or sets of colors.
Click New at the upper right of the panel, and zero out all the sliders, then paint a mask over the bottom half of the picture. With the Auto Mask option selected, it shoud be pretty easy to get all of the mountains in a selection. You may have to release the mouse and click again to paint in the water.
Switch the Range Mask menu to Color, and use the Color Range Selector (the eyedropper) to select the green at the front of the image. This will apply the effect to anything in that color. If you hold down the Shift key, you can add more colors into the range to be affected.
If you’d like a visual representation of the colors that are affected, hold down the Alt/Option key and drag the Amount slider. The image will turn into a black-and-white mask—white areas will have the effect applied; black areas will not. Keep the Alt/Option key held down and adjust the Amount slider until you get the exact amount of white in the mask that you want to affect.
Adjust the mountains in the image to taste, or you can use the settings I’ve applied in the picture:
Contrast: 39
Shadows: 39
Dehaze: 28
Saturation: 28
Once that’s complete, remove the flare at the center front of the mountain range by using the Spot Removal tool.
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It will take a couple of tries with range masking to get the hang of how to work with luminance and color, and when to use each, but I guarantee you it is an incredibly powerful tool that gets the very best out of specific areas in an image.
Could you do this in Photoshop? Absolutely. But the trick is to work efficiently on your images. Any time you can use a local adjustment to complete the work you need to do in one spot and save yourself a trip to Photoshop, it’s a good thing.
