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Presets that carry AI masks are the trick most landscape shooters overlook, and they can shave real minutes off every edit. Fall gives you a short window of color, cool air, and quieter parks, so the less time you spend clicking through the same steps in Lightroom Classic, the more frames you bring home.
Building a workflow around virtual copies and reusable masks is exactly what Terry Vander Heiden walks through, using three shots from Grand Teton National Park. Vander Heiden starts with a shortcut worth memorizing: highlight a batch of images, hold Shift to select the range, then press Command and the apostrophe key to spin up virtual copies of everything at once. That gives you a safe copy to experiment on while your original stays untouched. From there, he moves into a black-and-white conversion that leans on the clipping view rather than guesswork. Tapping the letter J lights up the highlight and shadow warnings, and holding the Option or Alt key while dragging the white and black sliders shows you precisely where detail burns out or crushes to pure black.
Once the tones are set, the color mixer becomes the real workspace for black and white. Vander Heiden pushes the reds to make the snow on the peaks separate, warms the oranges and yellows to lift the foliage, and drops the blues to darken the sky into something with punch. He then saves the whole recipe as a custom preset called "black and white landscape," which he's clear about treating as a starting point instead of a finished look. His stance on presets is refreshingly practical: you don't need to buy someone else's, you build your own to match how you like your images, then hover over other shots to preview the same settings before committing. That habit alone changes how fast you can move through a card full of similar frames.
The part that pays off most is masking. Lightroom's AI-driven landscape masks split an image into sky, mountains, vegetation, water, and natural ground automatically, and Vander Heiden bakes those masks straight into a preset so they regenerate on any new photo. Apply the preset, wait a second or two, and every mask appears fresh for that specific image rather than copied blindly from another. If Lightroom can't find something, say natural ground, it flags the mask with a small yield sign and you simply delete it. He shows both approaches: one preset that carries your actual adjustments for a run of near-identical shots, and a leaner preset that only generates the masks so you're free to edit each one on its own terms.
The bigger shift here is treating your catalog like an assembly line before you ever touch a slider. Bring a full trip's worth of landscapes in, run the mask preset across all of them, and every image is now pre-segmented and ready. This mirrors how Lightroom's masking has evolved since Adobe introduced AI-based Select Sky and Select Subject, then expanded into object detection that now recognizes distinct scene elements. Leaning on that means your local adjustments stop being one-off manual selections and become repeatable moves you can dial the same way every time. For anyone shooting the same location across a week, that consistency is what keeps a set of photos looking like they belong together, and it frees you to make creative calls on light and color instead of redrawing the same gradient over a ridgeline again and again. It fits best when your images share a structure, a horizon, a mountain line, a foreground of grass or water, which is precisely what fall landscape trips tend to produce.
Vander Heiden also covers housekeeping that keeps the panel clean, including hiding the portrait presets you'll never use through the manage presets menu and deleting user presets you no longer need, with a fair warning that deletions can't be recovered.
Watch the full walkthrough in the video above to see the clipping and color-mixer moves in action before your next fall shoot.
English (US) ·