Understanding the ‘Intersect’ Function of Lightroom’s New Masking Tools

It’s not often that a new Lightroom update or feature is as positively received by users as last week’s Masking improvements. And there's a good reason for the fanfare because these new tools really are amazing… as well as a bit confusing and inconsistent.

They are confusing because of a new layer of logic that Lightroom users can apply when determining exactly where you want to edit within a selection, by using combinations of the “Add” and “Subtract” functions within each mask. You can take it a step further by using the “Intersect” function to refine your selection, which seems to be causing a lot of confusion.

Furthermore, these masking tools are also inconsistent because you won’t find any trace of the Intersect menu item in the newer Lightroom Desktop or Lightroom Mobile, although you can absolutely achieve the exact same functionality in both apps. You’ll only find the Intersect option in Lightroom Classic when you click on the ellipse (…) next to a mask.

Fortunately, all Lightroom users can benefit from this especially powerful tool regardless of which version you prefer. If you’re using Lightroom Desktop or Mobile, the way to replicate the Intersect function is to make your initial selection, then click Subtract, make your secondary selection, and finally click on Invert.

The way I approach explaining Intersect is as follows: your initial selection—whether it’s made using the Select Subject/Sky options or any of the existing selection tools—determines the What of your localized edit. Using Intersect takes it a step further by allowing you to specify Where in your initial selection you want to edit by combining it with a secondary selection. To illustrate this, check out the GIF below. I made my initial selection by using Select Subject. That is the What in terms of my localized edit. Next, I determined Where I want to refine my edit by using the Intersect tool with a Linear Gradient mask.

The new Intersect tool is undoubtedly one of the headier tools within the entire Lightroom ecosystem, but it’s also one of the most powerful if you’re into localized editing. Once you’re able to wrap your head around how to use it effectively, it’ll open up all sorts of creative opportunities to make precise edits to targeted areas within your photos.

About the author: Brian Matiash is a professional photographer, videographer, and published author based in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. His passion is to serve other photographers by helping them grow their own visual pursuits. Learn more about Brian by visiting his website, on Instagram, and on YouTube.

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How to Leverage Lightroom’s New Masking Tools in Your Workflow

Unless you’ve just emerged from a nuclear fallout bunker, you’ve likely already heard about Lightroom’s impressive new masking tools that Adobe announced at their annual Adobe Max conference. In fact, PetaPixel’s Ryan Mense wrote a wonderful hands-on article covering the expanse of these new masking tools.

My goal for this workflow video is to approach these tools from a practical perspective, without getting mired in some of the more technical aspects of these powerful technologies. It’s not that they are not important or worth knowing. I love nerding out about the intersection of AI and photo editing. But, I also understand that there are many photographers who are simply interested in seeing how these new tools work in a way that would be most applicable within their own post-processing workflows.

The Power of AI-Driven Masking

At a high level, the two most important updates to Lightroom’s selective editing are:

The use of AI to intelligently select the sky and subject(s) in your composition and

The way that you can have multiple selections, or masks, interact with each other by using the Add, Subtract, Invert, and Intersect tools.

In my opinion, these two updates are some of the most significant to come to Lightroom since localized edits were introduced back in 2008 with Lightroom v2. At the risk of gushing, I cannot overstate how much flexibility this new local editing workflow offers photographers. Fine-edged selections that used to take several minutes to refine now occur within 1-2 seconds (at least on my M1 Macbook Air). And with the quasi-logic of the Add and Subtract tools, I can further target the specific areas of my photo that I want to selectively edit.

Unsung heroes

It’s important to also bring up a few other notable updates to Lightroom that may have been lost in all the fanfare. Notably, the “New Coke” version of Lightroom finally got the powerful Color, Luminance, and Depth Range masking tools that Lightroom Classic users have enjoyed for a few years now. As a Lightroom CC user, I cannot begin to express how happy I am to have access to these tools.

And as if mobile photo editing hadn’t been impressive enough with Lightroom iOS/Android, just about all of these new masking tools have made their way to this on-the-go platform. Which, when you take a moment to think about, is truly amazing. Imagine being able to make these fine-tuned edits on your phone.

Onto the workflow video!

Ok, enough gushing. I promised you a workflow video and here it is. Again, my goal for this video was to show you some creative ways to leverage these new masking tools to quickly achieve precise edits. In fact, in some of the photos, 100% of my edits were made using local adjustments with these new masking tools.

I am also working on a few add-on videos that showcase how well these tools sync across devices (start on your phone and finish up on your desktop), as well as how to use the Invert and Intersect masking options. I hope this video helps inspire you to try out these amazing new tools.

About the author: Brian Matiash is a professional photographer, videographer, and published author based in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. His passion is to serve other photographers by helping them grow their own visual pursuits. Learn more about Brian by visiting his website, on Instagram, and on YouTube.

#educational #software #tips #tutorials #adobe #adobelightroom #adobelightroomclassic #ai #aimasking #brianmatiash #lightroom #lightroomclassic #masking

Adobe Has Completely Redesigned Masking in Lightroom and ACR

Adobe has announced that it will be launching a redesigned and more powerful way to make selective adjustments -- collectively referred to as masking -- in Adobe Camera RAW (ACR) and all Lightroom applications at the end of October.

Adobe says that while it has been creating new ways to make selections with its AI-powered selection tools inside of Photoshop, the image processing engine used by ACR and Lightroom was not compatible with those tools. In order to bring them, or something like them, to those platforms, Adobe had to make large changes to the base image processing engine.

"This required the team to go back to the drawing board and re-imagine how the new masking engine could incorporate these AI-based tools across both mobile and desktop devices. We knew it would be essential that photographers have access to our best new tools anywhere, and on any device," Josh Bury of the ACR team says.

Previously, the only types of selections that were supported were vector-based, which meant that any adjustments made with a brush or gradient were recorded as mathematical expressions. This approach was great for avoiding creating large files and catalogs and would make syncing slower, as very small amounts of data could be used to represent even complex masking on high-resolution images.

AI-based masking, however, requires bitmap, or image-based support.

"In essence, the new AI-based masks create a grayscale image, where lighter values represent varying levels of selection and pure black represents no selection being made to that area. A rather common example of these grayscale bitmap-based masks can be found in Photoshop’s layer masks," Bury explains.

The ACR team needed to make it possible for both vector-based and bitmap-based masks to live together so that the brush, gradient, and range masks could continue to be vector-based while the AI-powered tools could be bitmap-based.

"The most important job of any selective tool, obviously, is making it possible to select specific objects or areas, and only those objects or areas," Bury says. "We needed to find a new paradigm that would not only enable these fancy new AI-powered tools (as well as future tools that are currently in the works) but also make it possible to refine the selections, and make selections that current (and possibly even future) AI-powered tools could not."

To achieve this, the ACR team created mask groups that make it possible to combine any mask tool with any other mask tool.

The result is a new masking tool that will be found in the ACR and Lightroom. A new button has replaced the former brush and gradient buttons. The new button is the masking button which, when clicked, will display all of the masking options available, including the new ones called "Select Subject" and "Select Sky."

When Select Subject, for example, is clicked in a photo that features a person, that person will immediately and automatically be masked. The mask can be tweaked and refined: adjustments can be made to the subject in the selection, the mask can be inverted, and it can be added to or subtracted from with additional masks.

The new Select Subject tool automatically creates a precise mask of the salient subject with a single click, and works on people, animals, and inanimate objects.

So, for example, a Select Subject mask can be inverted to select the entire background and then the Select Sky mask can be used to remove the sky from that selection, leaving only the area behind the subject that is not sky masked to allow for a targeted adjustment. All of that can be done now in a matter of a few clicks.

Adobe says that Select Sky creates a precise mask, even around foliage and uneven edges around the sky, making creating complex selections incredibly fast.

Adobe also made adjustments to range masks, including the ability to target an entire photograph. Range masks can work globally (or still be applied within a gradient as they were before using add and subtract controls) and more control has been given over the luminance range's falloff.

By first using Select Sky, then inverting the sky selection, and then subtracting using Select Subject, a single masking group can be made to select only the ground.

The Luminance Range Mask tool now provides a falloff control, enabling control over how quickly the selection transitions from the selected tonal range to the unselected range.

All masks can be named as well, which makes them easier to keep track of. Finally, masks can be previewed in a number of ways thanks to the overlay visualizations that the team brought over from Photoshop: the default color overlay, color overlay on black and white, image on black, image on white, and more.

These new tools work consistently across all of Adobe's applications and the range masks which were previously only found on ACR and Lightroom Classic are now also available in Lightroom and Lightroom Mobile, and all of the modify and refine masks are equally available through ACR, Lightroom, and Lightroom Classic.

These changes to masking will ship to all customers starting on October 26.

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