HOW TO MAKE THE MOST OF RANGE MASKING

Use Lightroom Classic CC’S Range Masking to shave hours off your editing time

01 CHOOSE YOUR TOOL

Select the Graduated Filter, Radial Filter or Adjustment Brush tool and make your selection. We used the Graduated Filter tool to lighten the dull grey of the background, however, we wanted to ensure that the bird remained untouched.

02 USE LUMINOSITY RANGE MASKS

To ensure that the adjustment tool only affected the background, we went to the Range Mask drop down menu and selected Luminance. Then, we used the Eyedropper tool to select the background, so that only those tones are affected.

03 REFINE YOUR SELECTION

Using the Eyedropper tool affects the Range slider. You can then manually adjust this slider until you’re happy with the results. The larger the range, the more of your selection will be affected by the adjustments you’ve made.

04 EXPERIMENT WITH COLOUR

Range masks can also be used with colour adjustments. We used the Radial Filter tool to boost the contrast and warmth of the bird with the Temperature slider to increase the yellows. However, this left a yellow-toned halo around the bird.

05 CREATE A COLOR RANGE MASK

To ensure that only the bird was affected, we chose a Color Range Mask and used the Eyedropper tool to select the brown tones of the bird’s feathers. This meant that the neutral colours were unaffected by the colour adjustments that we’d made.

06 ADD THE FINISHING TOUCHES

Now you can finish editing by exiting the adjustment tools and going to the Basic panel. We boosted the shadows to bring out the detail in the bird and increased the overall warmth in the image subtly with the Temperature slider.