Marvellous masks made perfect

Explore a powerful new way to select and edit parts of your shot in Lightroom

Layers in Photoshop offer a brilliant way to build up edits on different parts of your photo. But because of the way it works, Lightroom doesn’t have the benefit of layers. You can do local corrections that act like layers, but what you’ve been able do has been quite basic – until now, that is.

For Lightroom 11, Adobe has consolidated the previous local adjustment tools into a single Masking feature. It’s built from the ground up to give you far more power, and offers a better base for improvements. Older adjustments like the Graduated Filter, the Radial Filter and the Adjustment Brush are still there, as are Color Range and Luminance Range.

There are two more new options – and they are huge for Lightroom users. The first, Select Subject, accurately finds and masks the subject in the image. The second, Select Sky, detects the sky. Probably less obvious, but equally important, is that you can add and subtract masks as well as invert them. This means you can also select the background…