7 Transform Your Photos with AI Masking - SCAI021

Hey there and welcome back. In this section, we're going over artificial intelligence masking in Lightroom Classic. Now this is an incredibly powerful set of tools that basically allow you to select your subject or the background or the sky, and then just edit those areas of the images. Now we have an entire pro tutorial on AI masking in Lightroom Classic. So if you want to go more in depth, you can check that out. But we're going to give you a few different examples in this section on how to get this done and how to combine different masks together. You can select your subject and then maybe you want to darken the sky behind you. You can add or subtract that from the selection as well. So these tools are incredibly powerful and in this section, we're going to show you a few examples on how to get it done. We got a great section for you. Let's jump into Lightroom Classic. So we're starting off here. Let's go to our grass field images. And if you remember earlier, we actually labeled some of our images as red. We did some five star images. We really liked them, but I made them red because we said, Hey, we want to edit these a little bit further. So let's go up here. Just a little lesson, a little reminder. We already went over this and we're going to go to attribute right up here at the top. And then I'm going to go to color red. There we go. So we have these three images. So let's go ahead and start off with this image here. We have three different subjects. We're going to go into our develop module. So all of our masking is going to be within the develop module. Okay. Let's close everything down on the side. And all of the masking is going to be right here. This masking, you can hit shift W, but this icon is going to open up a world of possibilities. I know it's like they should make it bigger because it's like actually really, really important. Okay. Let's go ahead and click on that. And here you can see, now we can select our subject. You can select the sky. You can select the background. Now what happens if you have multiple people in your photos? Well, it can actually detect multiple people. There we go. And as I hover over them, you can see they actually get selected as well, which is really, really cool. So let's say to start off, we want to select person number one. Okay. I'm going to just select the entire person. You can actually select like facial skin, body skin, eyebrows, like so many different options. In this case, we'll just do the entire person. Now I want to add people as well. Let's just click this plus icon. We're going to add person number two and person number three. All right. And then let's go ahead and hit this continue button. So now all three people are selected. How cool and easy was that to do? So now that they're selected, we're just going to go all the way down to the bottom and hit create mask. There we go. So now that we have a mask, this is our mask. We can kind of view it here. The black area is not selected. The light area is selected, and you can see, in fact, three people are selected in there. And with this mask, now, just like we talked about in our last masking section, we did a very simple like radial blur, like a radial mask to make our subject a little bit brighter. Now we have such precise selections that we can use all of these tools on the right-hand side. So you can see it says mask one. There we go. And then everything that's here within this light gray area, this is all going to be affecting that area. And then I go down, and then when it starts to say basic, that's going to start affecting everything. So you'll have this delete all masks and close, but basically like when you are selected on your mask, there we go, you're going to see all of this light gray area. So detail, sharpness, grain, effects, even curves, saturation, color temperature, highlight, shadow, exposure, all of this stuff is going to be just affecting these areas. And in this case, it's just the people we selected. Okay. Now a couple of little tips here. You have this show overlay icon. Okay. You can turn that off or on. You can also hit O on your keyboard to turn that off or on. You can select the color of the overlay. Like I have this like pink color selected, but let's say your image was the same color as your overlay. So you couldn't see it really well. You just click here and you can change the color of it very easily. Okay. So let's go ahead and start working with our mask one. Now what do I want to do? I'm going to hit O because I don't necessarily need to see that right now. What do I want to do with these individuals? They look great for the most part. It's just that the shadows are a little bit too dark for like my personal taste. So let's go here where it says shadows. We're just going to click here and drag this up. Keep in mind, this is only going to be on these people. It's not going to be anywhere else. Look at that incredibly powerful tool. So let's just bring that up just a little bit. And then honestly, in my opinion, I feel like the color temperature could be a little bit warmer. So here where we have our color temperature, I'm just going to click and drag that to the right just a tiny bit. You don't have to go much with these tools. Just a little bit really helps out. And then I don't know, I feel like maybe tiny little bit of exposure as well. I probably overdid it with my color temperature. You can also change it just by changing the number here. So nine is what it's at right now. I'm going to just type in three. Little changes really go a long way. Okay. Now to see your changes, you can either hit the slash key, which just gives you a nice before and after. There we go. Slash key is right above enter or return, or you can simply click right here on this little eyeball and then there's the before and the after. So you can see like very quickly and easily, I'm able to select those subjects, bring the exposure up just a little bit and make them look just a little bit better. Now let's say we want to select the background. Okay. I want to select like the sky. Well let's try it again. I'm going to hit create a new mask and in this time we're going to go to select sky. There we go. It's going to automatically figure out what is the sky in my image. Incredibly powerful. And now I'm just going to take this show overlay. We're going to turn that off. I'm going to bring our color temperature maybe a little bit cooler. There we go. It just basically makes the sky a little bit more blue and I'm going to bring this exposure down just a little bit. Okay. Now I think that looks pretty good to hear on the top, but right here on the bottom, I think this should be lighter in this area. So what we're going to do, we have this mask already. I can subtract from this mask. Okay. The mask right now, as you can see, is just the entire sky, but if I hit subtract, there we go. Then I can subtract, let's say a linear gradient. Okay. Let's click there and then I'm just going to click and drag up to create a linear gradient and it's actually subtracting this linear gradient from my mask. You can see as I move the gradient up and down here, I'll make the gradient even smaller so you can see like the change more directly. There we go. So like literally I selected the sky and now I'm using this gradient to kind of fade it out. So it's not going to be nearly as visible as it comes on down. Now if you want to get rid of all these overlays, you can see like this guy, these, these are basically tools that you can grab to like adjust your gradient and other masks. But if you hold, you don't have to hold anything. If you just hit the letter H on your keyboard, it will hide those, H again will show them. So you can kind of see what you're doing just a little better. Let's click on this mask. So you can see we have our mask too. It started off with a sky selection and then we subtracted it. You can see our subtract icon, a linear gradient from that selection and that looks really good. And I can continue to go on this. And if I want to say, yeah, you know what? I don't, you know, I want to adjust my color temperature, maybe a little bit warmer. I want to change my exposure. I can do all this stuff at any time and the mask is going to stay there in, uh, with all of its detail, which is incredibly, incredibly powerful. So you can see how this AI masking tools are very powerful and you can combine them in multiple ways. Okay. Let's go back and edit a couple other images, the G for our grid mode. And we're going to go back to this image. So let's see, looking really good to start with. Let's hit the develop module on this. And then we're going to go right to our masks. Fantastic. So in this case, it's like, it's not finding any people. It's like, uh, I don't know. I don't think there's any people probably cause they're, you know, like relatively underexposed and kind of far away. Right. So let's go ahead. We're going to do a couple other masks on this. We'll still be able to get done what we need to get done. Let's start with our sky. Okay. It's going to find the sky, which is great. Let's bring our color temperature just a little bit more blue. That looks good. Maybe our exposure down just a tiny bit. Here we go. Not so blue. That looks really good. And now let's say when we want it, we want to just, uh, edit or work on this middle part of the image. We can create a new mask here, obviously select subject. It's not really finding the people right now, so we're not going to use any of these AI, but you can still totally use a brush or you can use all types of gradients. Let's do a linear gradient. I'm going to just do a linear gradient and then like bring this up. So it's going to kind of fade out where the tree line is. There we go. So that's our mask there. And we're going to just bring our exposure up just a little bit. Fantastic. And let's go ahead and bring our shadow levels up there as well. And then maybe I'll just bring the saturation down. It looks a little bit too saturated. We'll bring our color temperature up just a little bit there also. Fantastic. So on this mask, let's just turn this off and on. That's looking pretty good, but it didn't just affect the center of the photo. It also affected down here. So maybe I don't want that. We're going to subtract and I'm going to go to a linear gradient again, and then I'm going to subtract it out from the bottom. So you can see when I hit H to bring up the controls so I can actually see what I'm doing. There we go. Let's go ahead and feather it out a little bit. So basically I was able to, let's hit H again, I was able to edit just the middle part of the photo by bringing up a linear gradient and then subtracting out another linear gradient. And there's literally unlimited ways that you can do this. Okay. Now I can go back here and say, yeah, maybe I made the sky a little bit too blue. Okay. I can go right over here and maybe say, yeah, I want the exposure actually to be a little bit. Let's bring our shadow levels up just a bit more. There we go. Maybe our exposure down a little bit. Color temperature up just a little bit more. That's actually looking pretty good. I'm going to go back to the sky that we did earlier. I think I made it a little bit too blue. There we go. I just want to make sure that it matches with the overall image. And this is looking really good. So we were able to do this with two masks. Let's just hit the slash key. So there's our before and our after. Not a huge change on the sky, actually. I wound up like making it pretty blue and then looking at the overall image, it was like, it didn't look so good, that blue. It made a lot more sense. But being able to edit just the center part of the image worked really, really well. So that was just with two gradients. So whether or not the AI tools are able to find your people, and most of the time they work really well. In this case, they were just a little farther away. All right. Let's hit G for a gradient, G for the grid tool, grid view. So many G's. All right. Let's go back and edit this image here. So let's click here on this image. Let's go to the develop module. We're going to click on masking, and then we're going to go to our subject. There we go. It's going to detect the person. Fantastic. Did a great job. And we're just going to bring the shadow levels up just a little bit on the person. Like there's not really much detail on this person. It's like they're wearing black clothing and it's, you know, a shot straight into sunlight, but I am able to select them and bring up my shadow levels on that person, which creates a really nice effect. Fantastic. Let's hit G to get back to our grid view. Now, we're going to go to another image. Let's go to our lake fashion. There we go. And we're just going to scroll down to this image here. So let's hit I on this image to bring in our information. So this is 9836514. Fantastic. Let's hit the develop again, and we're going to go to our AI masking. So now let's just go ahead and show you a few of the different tools within the AI masking. So the subject, I think it's pretty self-explanatory. Click on subject. It finds your subject and masks them out. Pretty cool. Let's go dot, dot, dot. We'll just delete that mask. Fantastic. Sky. We've already done that. Select sky. It's going to find the sky and make it a selection. Really, really nice. Let's just go ahead and delete that one as well. And then background is basically just going to be the inverse of your subject. So like you can literally select your subject and invert that mask if you wanted to, but it's going to find your subject and invert that mask. All right, let's go ahead and delete that one as well. You have this new objects selection tool where you can actually start to paint on objects you would like to select, and it's going to do its best to find them. In this case, you can see it selected out her sleeve as an object. So literally that's the mask that we get as an object. Really, really powerful. All right, let's go ahead and delete that one. And they're adding to these tools all the time and making them better. Brush literally does what it says. You paint on where you would like to affect. In my opinion, I don't use this as much, especially because this AI masking is so, so good. But if you do want to use the brush, my recommendation would actually bring the flow relatively low and then bring the feathering a little bit higher. There we go. Let's just create a new brush and I'll show you. With the flow relatively low and the feather a little bit higher, you get a much more subtle effect. See, as I'm painting it in here, it's not such a strong... You can see the color, like this magenta color, it's kind of fading it in there. As I paint in, there we go. As I paint that in, and this is going to give me a much more subtle effect if I want to just affect those areas. But again, with select subject, it works so well that usually I'm not using this brush too much. There we go. Let's go ahead and delete those. There we go. And then back with radial gradient, we've already done that. Linear gradient, we've already done that. That's basically just selecting in a linear fashion or in a radial fashion. And then we can select via range. So I can select via color range. For instance, I can click and drag here on this color of her suit, and it's actually going to select... It doesn't know that it's a suit in this case. It's literally just selecting the color of the suit, but you can see it selected out some of her hair as well. So in this case, if you wanted to, what you could do is go to your mask, you could hit subtract, and then you could go down to brush, all right? We'll bring feathering a little bit lower, bring our flow up, and then I'm going to subtract out, like I'm literally painting away the mask. I'm saying, oh, don't be on the ground there. There we go. So I selected the color range of her suit and then subtracted out her hair, face, and whatever's here on the ground. So a lot of these tools can be used in conjunction with one each other, and that's how they get more powerful. All right, let's go ahead and delete that one. And then range, you can also do this by luminance range. So you can click on an area or you can click and drag on an area, and it's going to select everything that's light, that like similar luminance range. Like if I click and drag here, it's going to select this based on, and luminance is like how light or dark it is. So it's going to select everything based on that. So this is a similar level of darkness as her suit, and so is the shadow. All right, fantastic. So hopefully that was like a decent overlay, overview on all of these tools. Now let's actually work on our subject a little bit. So let's go ahead and select our subject. Looking at, it didn't select the shoes, but that's fine. The shoes look totally fine. Let's go ahead. I'm going to just turn this overlay off here. You can just check this checkbox or you can hit O, and then we're just going to bring our shadow levels up just a little bit. And this is like such a powerful way to do it because this happens all the time where your subject is just a tiny bit underexposed, maybe your background's a little bit overexposed. It's very, very easy to make subtle changes here. I'm going to bring our saturation down a little bit. It just felt like the suit was just a little bit too saturated for this image. And overall, I think that's looking really, really good. Let's just bring our exposure up just a tiny bit there as well. And maybe our highlights down. Fantastic. I'm going to click on this eyeball here. There's our before and the after. And now let's make a new mask. So let's hit this plus icon. We're going to go to select background. There we go. And I'm just going to lower the... There we go. Lower the contrast here. Let's turn our overlay off. Lower the contrast here. Lower our highlight level just a little bit there. And bring our exposure down just a tiny bit. And then maybe work on our color temperature. Maybe make it a little bit more like green and cyan. There we go. And this is really nice. It's not affecting the subject at all. So I can turn this off and back on. And there we go. Looking really good. So I'm just going to hit this slash key. Again, it's above the return or the enter key. So there's our before and our after. You can see really, really nice changes. Very quick and easy to do. Now, if I go back to our grid view. So we're going to go to the library and hit G for the grid view. What's nice about this now is if I wanted to apply the same thing. I'm going to hit the plus icon a couple times to make this a little bit bigger. There we go. Minus icon one time. If I want to apply these same changes to this image. What I'm going to do is click on this image. Hold control or command and then click on the second image. Okay. We're going to go down here to sync settings. And then basically I'm going to hit check none. But I'm going to say go ahead and do the masking. Both mask one and mask two. If I hit synchronize here, you're going to see it automatically. Like look how perfect of a job it did. So let's go to our image and click on develop. Go into our mask. And you can see because we use the AI tools to select subject for this mask. And we brighten the subject a little bit. It's a different subject. It's a totally different person. It's in a different location and everything. But it knew to select the subject and then apply the same transitions. And then this one knew to select the background. And apply the same exact effects to the background. So I hit G, go back to my grid view. I'm going to just click on the two of those. I'm going to hit N for my survey view. And then just hit tab to get those a little bit. So I just see those. And now we can see like, I mean, they're in the same location. Same lighting and everything like that. But all of the editing that I did to this is automatically applied to that other image. Which in my opinion is just so incredibly helpful. People are moving around all the time in our pictures. We don't want to have to like individually select them on every single image. So you can see just how powerful these tools are. Especially when we combine them with being able to copy and paste these features from one image to another. So that's it for our section on AI masking. Again, we have an entire pro tutorial on AI masking in Lightroom Classic. So if you're interested in this, check it out. But obviously you can see these tools are incredibly powerful. They work really well. And the fact that you can sync them from one image to another to me is the best selling point. And one of the most powerful tools here in Lightroom Classic. Thanks so much. I'll see you guys in the next section. Bye everyone.