Lesson Info
9. Depth Range
Lessons
Lesson Info
Depth Range
Now let's take a more in depth. Look at the masks panel itself because there's actually a lot you can do to manipulate it and customize it to your own needs. You don't have to be stuck with the default configuration where it takes up the same kind of area where your adjustment sliders would usually be. Let's dive in and take a look when you work with a lot of mass. This can become a scroll herbal list where you have so many mass that it takes up more space than is available. Well down here at the bottom, you see this little bar, you can expand that. So if you get a lot of mass, you can see them. Also though when you get this expanded now you don't have very much space for your sliders. So at the top you also find a little bar and you can actually pull this out and put it over on the side. Even when you put it over on the side, you have this little double arrow here. If you click that you'll collapse it down so it doesn't take up very much space, but you still have pretty much all the f...
unctionality that we had before, You can still hover over masks to see what area they'd work on, you can still click on the mask and add to and take away from them. Or if you hold down option intersect them, it still shows you which elements it was made out of. So if you go down to one of the complex ones here, you can see that this one was made out of select the sky because that's what this icon means and I bet you I inverted it to get the opposite. Then I took away using a brush, took away using something else and took away again, took away using three different ways. And that ended up making this mask. So we can get it to be nice and small like that and we can still add a new one up here with a big plus sign and down at the bottom we have two icons. This one right here, that gives us our overlay options, the same choices you usually have right next to the little color that it shows you. And right here we can uh show the overlay or turn it off, remember the letter O would usually toggle that. So let's expand this again, I'll hit the double arrow up here. And so what we were looking at is that one checkbox was exactly the same as this and the thing right next to it was the exact same as this thing. And all we were doing is looking at these icons and we were looking here at these little ones here, just minus the names and we still had add and subtract. It really was the same functionality just in a much more compact package. But another thing you get with this panel is if you have the large version, like I do right now you're gonna find in the upper right is a little question mark. If you click on it, that's going to tell you all the keyboard shortcuts that can be used with this because you can switch between all those various tools we've been using using your keyboard if you get used to this stuff. So there's some good stuff in here. If you explore it, looking a little deeper into the masks panel, there's a few other things to notice. Uh first here's a mask I might happen to be working on and you know how it has a little thumbnail picture on the left where the area that's white indicates what would be adjusted in the picture. And if you hover over it, you get the overlay then below that you're going to find a little arrow pointing in. And that simply means that this end result was created using these individual tools. The bottom most one is the base, that's what you started with and then the one above that is considered to be done. Next, then this one then that one to build up that effect. You can rename each one of these. If you double click on any one of these like here, I'm gonna double click and call this, subtract blue. Then every one of those steps could rename as well as the name of the final mask that it produces. That can make it a little easier if you have more than one person working on a project and they need to revisit an image that somebody else created, giving them names to each step can make it a little easier when you look here, you're gonna find a minus sign. Any time you're subtracting from a mask, anytime you're adding from a mask, there just won't be a symbol there. And if you ever intersect a mask, let me do that quick to this one. I'm gonna hold down the option key which adds to this here and changes it to intersect. And let's just say intersect with the sky because that looks a little different in the list. When I intersect with the sky, just let it finish there, you'll see there's just a minus sign. There is no intersect symbol, but this is an intersection even though it has that minus sign on. And that's because not only do you have the minus sign on it, but if you look over on the right side of my screen, it's also inverted and anytime you have something that's both inverted and it's a minus, that's the equivalent to an intersection. So it's a little weird. I kind of wish they would have had an icon that was for intersection instead of having to look at both of those. I didn't actually need to intersect this. So let's go to these three little dots in there. I'm gonna choose to delete that particular portion and with these icons there's a different icon for each tool. So this is a select sky. You'll find a different one for its select subject and different ones for color and luminescence. When you have one that isolates the color, it'll actually show you a sample of the color. So I can tell that this was subtracting blue because I see blue in this little circle. This one here was subtracting graze from the image. So hopefully now you're a little more comfortable navigating your way around the masks panel and if you choose to, that compact masked panel can make it. So you have a lot more space to work on your image and not so much real estate for the masks panel.
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Ratings and Reviews
Steve61861
I have taken almost every course Ben has done for CL and he is an amazing teacher, Ben always starts easy and moves to more advanced concepts - usually ramping things up over one or even several courses. In this course he takes you from easy to advanced concepts very quickly. I loved this course because I can use it to become a much better photographer ultimately reaching (or trying to reach) the advanced levels Ben presents by the end of the course. It is a terrific course from a real master of the photographic editing skill.
Gary Hook
Once again Ben has hit it out of the park. I truly enjoy his instructional technique. By that I mean he explains the point and then demonstrates it talking about what he did. The visual combined with the instruction is highly effective at enhancing the learning. Short, sharp and to the point on this amazing update to LR. Highly recommend this workshop
Christine Stockwell
Adobe’s new masking engine is a real game-changer and Ben does a fantastic job of showing what can be done and how. Thank you Ben! Now I want to go back through my image archive and reprocess many of them.