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Lesson Info

Introduction: Discussion On New Masking Module

Hi welcome to Masking in Lightroom Mobile. My name is lisa Kearney and I am a finisher and a photographer, a designer. Re toucher and educator all that and I'm here to show you the marvels of the new masking in Lightroom mobile and Holy guacamole. It is a game changer. This really is going to up your editing ability on Lightroom Mobile. And when I talk about Lightroom mobile, I'm actually saying mobile meaning iphone ipad and or desktop just to be really clear. And here's the thing, Lightroom is a dark room in your hand and this new software that they've developed with masking is really gonna jump your game. I mean way up here, a huge game changer and why is that? It's because the ai technology in the masking is going to allow you to make very, very sophisticated edits all while you're out on the go and while you're still in the environment where you're shooting, so you can make different editing decisions, you can make different shooting decisions because you can edit while you're out...

side and I have to say, I think this is such a huge game change for digital processing and image editing. I mean a big game change kind of like when digital started taking over for film seriously, I think it's that big of a game change. So I'm hoping I can really dive in deep with you with this course and figure out how this tool is currently working what you can look for and maybe some surprise things underneath the hood which Lightroom is full of all kinds of surprises. So here's the gig as I said, Lightroom mobile is a dark room in your hands, hands down and it's a completely professional tool and you can actually even shoot with your mobile device and or shoot with a DSLR and import it into your mobile device and do editing. That's how expansive it is. And these powerful tools you're gonna find in the masking selective edits. Sky edits subject edits I think are gonna absolutely blow you away. And I said earlier, I'm a re toucher and why I want to emphasize this is I have a tendency to be a heavy editor and it's just my trade, it's my nature, it's kind of my vision and I want to remind you while you're taking this class, you can choose to edit as strongly or as minimally as you choose. I'm really just trying to show you the tool so when you have the tool in your hand you can see how much it's done. You choose how much you want to do? You don't have to follow my vision. I just like to show you the capacity. And the other thing I'm going to really emphasize in this course is which device like when are you on your mobile device, your phone, your smart phone or when are you on your ipad and you want to do your editing here. We're going to talk about the pros and cons and why it matters is with the phone versus the ipad versus desktop. Lightroom mobile and the masking features operate a little differently and this is important. So you can make some decisions about when to edit and how to edit and in addition to that, what I want to tell you is sometimes it's combination. So I will often start with my mobile device, I'm out in the field shooting, I'm getting some shots and I'm doing some quick edits so that I can see that I got the shot, then maybe I have my ipad with me and I sit down and I do a little of the editing that way and or sometimes I just come back to the studio and I work on my desktop and it's completely flexible and that's what's so amazing about this software. Seriously, I just love it. Can you tell? Okay, the other thing I want to talk about is that because you're on these mobile devices, you can also go to third party apps easily enough and you can put logos on your device and send up to social. So that's a big plus to working mobili. Now we gotta talk about something here which is this is not Photoshop this is Lightroom And lightroom and Photoshop are different and they're different for a reason. Lightroom is not a compositing program, it does not support layers. So there's gonna be times where you can do 80%, of what you want to do in lightroom or even 100 but there may be those occasions where you really need to bring it into Photoshop. And I gotta say I really would like to encourage the community to not think of either or you know, am I in Photoshop or my lightroom and I have to choose one. You don't you don't you can do all of it on your mobile device. You Photoshop on the ipad is amazing. So you're not limited. And I'd like to encourage that kind of thinking that it's about picking the proper tool at the proper time. It's not choosing which tool is the only tool I get to use. I hope that makes sense to you guys. So in this class we're also going to talk about like uh what can you do in a mask? Hence the editing tools. And then we're gonna talk about how do you do it in a mask? So the functionality of the mask. And then we're going to talk about, we've the royal we I'm going to talk a bit about maybe how you can do some combination editing and that sort of thing. So let's take a look, let's dive on in and get into this amazing world of masking in Lightroom mobile masking in Lightroom mobile in this course. Here's what we're going to be looking at. We're going to look at the editing modules. This is really important because the editing modules are what you utilize while you're in the masking tool. However not all of them are available. So we're going to do a brief review of what the editing modules are because frankly that's where all the magic happens and which ones can you use in the masking and which ones you can't. And then on top of that it's a little confusing. Is even though you have similar editing modules within the masking module, they're not the same. No, they're not the same. So some of the functionality gets minimized, some of it changes completely. So we're gonna talk a little bit about that. Then we're going to dive into the masking modules. And what I mean is that how to what what does that button do? What does this button do? What are the the masking choices you have? So we're gonna break that down. There's a really great way of adding to a mask. This is oh my gosh, I can't express to you how excited I am about this. You can add or subtract in a gazillion different ways with your masking. And this is what makes it so sophisticated. I think your minds are gonna be absolutely blown. If you haven't stepped into the masking yet, then we're also gonna talk about making specialty mask mask. And what I mean by that would be something like rim lighting? How do you add or subtract to a mass to get something like rim lighting. We're going to talk also about organizing. Yes, organizing your mask, this is a really important segment about education and Lightroom and professional workflow is organization. So with masks in lightroom they know this and they've set it up so that you can organize your mask, you can label them, you can reverse the order of some of them. It's really pretty amazing and definitely sophisticated. I'm gonna show you how you can also with social posts actually even add a logo to your image. So we're going to talk about masking perhaps making an area of the image readable, put a logo in it and post as social because this is another feature of lightroom mobile that I think is very under utilized and it is amazing. So let's take a look at some work and talk about the process of masking some pros cons things you can do with it and then we'll get into the mechanics. Come on. So let's take a look at some of the amazing functions you can do with masking. So for example, I like to shoot outdoors. I like to do what I say are caught moments and the masking allows me to do these more editorial style. Uh, artie if you will interpretations of my images and before I couldn't do this on my phone or my ipad, I would have to take it into Photoshop and now I'm able to do these while I'm standing there, which gives me a lot of flexibility in my shooting and sometimes well I'm a fast creator meaning I like to create on the fly and this works for my style. Other folks are maybe more meticulous or planned out. You can still use masking. I'm just promoting this as a fast and really formidable tool. So I shot this on my IPhone 10 with a little light from the hardware store for $8. It's amazing what you can use nowadays. And with Lightroom asking you can photograph your furry friends and get really amazing mass automatically using select subject. And that way you can bring your subject forward and push your background back quickly and easily. Oh wow, the kitty is still sitting there and as I mentioned before, I'm a heavy editor. A lot of my editorial work involves the need to have type put in the peace either behind the characters or subjects or around them. So I tend to have a style that can push the boundaries of editing. I'm not suggesting you guys do this for your work. However, masking allows me to do this so quickly and easily. All without Photoshop Now, it's not the Photoshop is bad. It just dream lines. The process that I can do it quickly and get different looks and seriously. This takes me about 5 to 10 minutes with Lightroom Mobile. The other thing I really enjoy is the ability to push the extremes on tone. So on a recent trip to Croatia while I'm shooting into the sunset. I know to expose for the highlights. So I can bring out shadow detailing and with the tonal range on the masking, wow, look what you can create. The key here is to know to expose for the highlights and because it's all mobile I can test this out while I'm still in the environment. I don't have to wait till I get back to my hotel and think oh I missed the shot with the selects sky feature. You can bring out amazing detail in the clouds and sky and then use traditional radial and linear gradients inside the masking feature. It really transforms your landscapes quite quickly. And I'll tell you my 100% all time favorite reason for using the masking feature in lightroom mobile is the fact that you can so dramatically change the feel vibe and tone of an image in minutes and even to the point where you can change the lighting and adding rim light and affects because I don't know how many of you tried to shoot your furry friends but they're not always really agreeable to the process. And sometimes getting lighting on them is really challenging. I'm just lucky to go out and shoot them a natural lighting. And this way I can really create my own vision all with the masking tool and I'm going to tell you it's crackers amazing how quickly you can transform a really boring environment like this photo shoot done at high noon, the worst possible lighting you can imagine. And with all these masks, as I said earlier, you can have up to 42 mass in this program, you can completely transform a day shot into evening or dusk on a mobile device. I mean cracker is amazing. This particular image illustrates the need for organization. I would never suggest you leave a file like this with mask one through eight but rather rename them. So you know what the mask is controlling. It's just good production. I'd like to give myself little challenges. So one of the things I do is I shoot this freeway overpass every single day. It's on my run route And then I like to challenge myself to see if I can do different kinds of edits and the masking really helps this. I'm not sure this is super successful, but it's a great experiment and a great way to practice. And lastly I want to talk a little bit about some of the hidden benefits in Lightroom mobile. So for example when I'm out there shooting my clients, they were still in the water. Like hey, can we post to social and with lightroom mobile, you can actually stick in logos on your phone while you're still standing in the water. And what's nice is with the masking, you can create areas where the type will read beautifully. We're gonna look at that. I'm sure you're going to utilize this in your workflow and I cannot emphasize how excited clients get when they see immediate results and immediate postings. So let's dive in. All right. First things first, we have to be 100% clear. We're talking about adobe Lightroom and they now seem to call it this adobe Photoshop Lightroom. I don't know what the heck that's all about. But Lightroom not Lightroom Classic. And this is really important. Lightroom Classic is a desktop version only, not cloud based. So we're talking Light room Within lightroom there is a free version available on your mobile device and a premium version. The premium version you need to have to do masking. And this is part of your creative cloud suite. You probably already have it if you don't. You can also get lightroom on your mobile device for I think something as low as 499 a month, which will give you access to all this premium uh functions and storage. And while we're talking about Lightroom, I want to be really clear. We're talking about using Lightroom on your mobile device as an actual camera. You're shooting through Lightroom mobile. But then you can edit through Lightroom mobile. And when you're editing on Lightroom mobile, you can do it on a laptop on web desktop ipad, surface pad phone, phone is either uh android and or a Apple. It doesn't matter which device. However, there are some functions on the android phone that don't work. For example, some of the cameras you can use through Lightroom mobile, but otherwise the program works seamlessly the same. This is not to be glossed over that. You can edit an image on mobile. You can then take it to your ipad and do more precise work because you have more real estate to even going to your desktop and having even different controls available there. So this is supremely important, especially when it relates to masking. The other thing I love about the cross platform nature of Lightroom is culling images so on your mobile device, an ipad while you can enlarge the image is slightly bye bye, squeezing your fingers out on the desktop and web. You can actually slide this slider here and make your image is much larger, Way easier for editing and making decisions on which shot is the best.