How To Take Control Of Your Edits With Lightroom Classic Masks

If you use Lightroom Classic, masking is the line between “good enough” and an edit that looks intentional. This video focuses on the masking tools that let you target light, color, and texture without pushing the whole frame in the same direction.

Coming to you from Gareth Evans with Park Cameras, this practical video walks through the masking panel in Lightroom Classic and shows what each option is actually for. You start with the automated picks that do the boring work fast: Select Subject, Select Background, and Select Sky. The point is not “make it dramatic,” it’s control, like lifting exposure on a face without washing out a bright sky. Evans also shows the less talked-about reality of auto masks: they can grab the wrong edge, like a tail or hair, and you need a quick cleanup step to keep the edit believable. You see the rhythm that makes masks useful, which is create the mask, check it, then adjust, instead of guessing and undoing for 10 minutes.

The video also covers Select Object, which is the tool you reach for when the “subject” choice is not the thing you need. You paint a loose shape over what you want, and Lightroom figures out the real borders, so you can brighten a building or add contrast without brushing every window line by hand. Then it shifts into people masking, where Lightroom breaks one person into parts like facial skin, body skin, eyes, and hair. That sounds like a gimmick until you watch how quickly it lets you make small, separate changes, like dialing down texture on skin while nudging exposure in the irises. There’s a checkbox that decides whether those parts become one mask or several, which changes how you manage the edit later when you want to tweak one area without touching the rest. If you do any portraits at all, you’ll recognize the time sink this avoids.

After the auto tools, the video turns to the masks you build yourself, and this is where your style starts to show up. Linear Gradient and Radial Gradient are treated like lighting tools, not special effects, so you’re shaping attention and balancing the frame instead of “adding a look.” Evans demonstrates moving gradients from the top, bottom, and sides, then adjusting feathering so transitions stay soft instead of obvious. The Brush gets its own moment too, including the Auto Mask toggle, which helps you stay inside edges when you need a quick, clean selection. You also get introduced to Color Range and Luminance Range, which let you isolate a specific color or brightness zone when a shape-based mask is too blunt, like targeting only the blues in the sky without selecting everything that happens to be bright.

The part that should make you pause is intersecting masks, because it changes how you think about precision inside Lightroom Classic. Instead of accepting a gradient that spills onto a subject, you can tell Lightroom to apply it only where it overlaps with another selection, like “only the sky,” or “only the background,” or “only the subject.” That opens up edits that used to require careful brushing, especially when you want to darken one side of a portrait without muddying skin tones, or when you want a sky adjustment that cleanly avoids the horizon line. The video shows this in both a landscape-style frame and a portrait-style frame, and the difference is how confidently you can push an adjustment when the mask boundary is doing the discipline. Evans hints at a repeatable workflow for stacking these moves so you can build a look step by step, instead of gambling on one heavy-handed global slider move. Check out the video above for the full rundown from Evans.