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Author Topic: New masking in LR coming out  (Read 5270 times)

john beardsworth

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Re: New masking in LR coming out
« Reply #20 on: October 18, 2021, 11:53:59 am »

Equally, I wouldn't want to minimize the change. While I do find the overall experience more fiddly, that's only a small regret because local adjustments are significantly more powerful, especially when they're used in combination. For example, you can select a sky, but then graduate the adjustment impact by subracting a linear gradient from the sky. Or you can select all the blues in an image using a colour range selection, but then use a radial filter to remove the effect in one part of the image.

I've not actually tried taking images with these adjustments back from Lr11 to Lr10, but I'd not be too optimistic that the adjustments will survive.
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digitaldog

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Re: New masking in LR coming out
« Reply #21 on: October 18, 2021, 12:55:11 pm »

At least on this end, Sky Replacement works very well and on its own is a great new masking feature.
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simon.garrett@iee.org

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Re: New masking in LR coming out
« Reply #22 on: October 18, 2021, 03:18:36 pm »

Quote
I am sure it will be vector based... as the whole LR program is.
Quote
This implies to me that any Brush or Gradient (Linear or Radial) adjustments from the old process will be imported/migrated/converted (pick your term) to the new process.

I quoted this a day or two ago, from an Adobe blog:

With the new masking functionality, we needed to make it possible for both vector-based as well as bitmap-based masks to live together in harmony. The brush, gradients, and range masks continue to be vector-based (to limit space used when making masks) while the AI-powered tools such as select subject and select sky use these bitmap-based masks.

The author (Josh Bury) doesn't say whether there will be a new catalog format, but I infer that existing tools and existing adjustments to images will remain.

See this Adobe blog article.


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digitaldog

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Re: New masking in LR coming out
« Reply #23 on: October 18, 2021, 03:27:24 pm »

The author (Josh Bury) doesn't say whether there will be a new catalog format, but I infer that existing tools and existing adjustments to images will remain.
Yes, you'll update the catalog so like all times in the past this has occurred, keep the backup the older one for awhile.
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fdisilvestro

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Re: New masking in LR coming out
« Reply #24 on: October 18, 2021, 04:09:39 pm »

Does any of you who have tested the new version know or can tell if it is going to be possible to choose between local adjustment that are located exactly in the same position?
E.g. when you duplicate a brush, you can select only the topmost one.

john beardsworth

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Re: New masking in LR coming out
« Reply #25 on: October 18, 2021, 04:57:06 pm »

I think that's still awkward, at least if you duplicate it on the same layer, sorry mask. But if you remember a keyboard shortcut, you can also duplicate in place by dragging a local adjustment onto the + button (new mask). So the duplicate is in exactly the same location but you can easily select it as it's on a different layer / mask.
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jrsforums

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Re: New masking in LR coming out
« Reply #26 on: October 18, 2021, 05:03:51 pm »

Does any of you who have tested the new version know or can tell if it is going to be possible to choose between local adjustment that are located exactly in the same position?
E.g. when you duplicate a brush, you can select only the topmost one.

It’s only ~ a week before we all see it!!! 😀😀
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John

simon.garrett@iee.org

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Re: New masking in LR coming out
« Reply #27 on: October 18, 2021, 05:47:12 pm »

I think that's still awkward, at least if you duplicate it on the same layer, sorry mask. But if you remember a keyboard shortcut, you can also duplicate in place by dragging a local adjustment onto the + button (new mask). So the duplicate is in exactly the same location but you can easily select it as it's on a different layer / mask.

From the same blog post I quoted:

Another major request was the ability to name each mask, making it easier to keep track of each mask group and what it’s doing.

Don't know if that will make it easier.
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Chris Kern

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Re: New masking in LR coming out
« Reply #28 on: October 18, 2021, 07:17:23 pm »

At least on this end, Sky Replacement works very well and on its own is a great new masking feature.

Does this work the same in Lightroom as in Photoshop, where invoking Sky Replacement triggers the creation of a group of additive mask layers?  Or is it something new?  (I.e., "and now for something completely different. . . . ")

digitaldog

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Re: New masking in LR coming out
« Reply #29 on: October 18, 2021, 07:24:02 pm »

Does this work the same in Lightroom as in Photoshop, where invoking Sky Replacement triggers the creation of a group of additive mask layers? 
Basically yes, in terms of a selection.
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john beardsworth

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Re: New masking in LR coming out
« Reply #30 on: October 19, 2021, 03:07:42 am »

From the same blog post I quoted:
Another major request was the ability to name each mask, making it easier to keep track of each mask group and what it’s doing.
Don't know if that will make it easier.

Neither do I, but it's certainly possible as you see here. I don't normally bother.
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john beardsworth

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Re: New masking in LR coming out
« Reply #31 on: October 19, 2021, 03:12:47 am »

Does this work the same in Lightroom as in Photoshop, where invoking Sky Replacement triggers the creation of a group of additive mask layers?  Or is it something new?  (I.e., "and now for something completely different. . . . ")

At the risk of being embarrassed if I've overlooked it, there's no Sky Replacement - there is Sky Selection.

Of course, it seems a relatively short leap to imagine Sky Replacement might be coming.
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Chris Kern

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Re: New masking in LR coming out
« Reply #32 on: October 19, 2021, 06:58:46 am »

At the risk of being embarrassed if I've overlooked it, there's no Sky Replacement - there is Sky Selection.

It's Edit>Sky Replacement in Photoshop 22.5.1.  (See attached.)

john beardsworth

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Re: New masking in LR coming out
« Reply #33 on: October 19, 2021, 08:52:28 am »

Yes, I know that feature. Maybe it's just crossed wires as I'd read this response and this is a Lightroom forum.

At least on this end, Sky Replacement works very well and on its own is a great new masking feature.
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jrsforums

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Re: New masking in LR coming out
« Reply #34 on: October 19, 2021, 10:39:33 am »

At the risk of being embarrassed if I've overlooked it, there's no Sky Replacement - there is Sky Selection.

Of course, it seems a relatively short leap to imagine Sky Replacement might be coming.

‘Sky selection’ by itself would be great.  It would be much better, if one could adjust the selection using the full color/calibration sliders, but, I’m guessing, only the normal ‘local adjustment’ sliders will be available.
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John

digitaldog

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Re: New masking in LR coming out
« Reply #35 on: October 19, 2021, 11:05:46 am »

‘Sky selection’ by itself would be great.  It would be much better, if one could adjust the selection using the full color/calibration sliders, but, I’m guessing, only the normal ‘local adjustment’ sliders will be available.
Indeed. I also failed to call the new feature “Sky Replacement” instead of “Selection” which is what you really get. Then move those sliders.
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Chris Kern

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Re: New masking in LR coming out
« Reply #36 on: October 26, 2021, 09:54:35 am »

I've only scratched the surface so far, but I'm favorably impressed.

The sky and subject masks—the new "A.I." features (i.e., based on machine-learning)—offer a quick head start for making selections.  Sometimes they nail the selection automatically, but sometimes you need to fiddle with it manually, for example with the brush tool; but that's also true in Photoshop.

Actually, however, I think an even greater benefit of the new masking design is that it makes it possible to create a sophisticated stack of non-destructive local adjustments that can be quite complex but are easy to work with.  You create these sequentially, and prior selections can become the basis for modified or intersecting subsequent ones.  Describing it makes it sound more complicated than it is in practice.

(When I say the local adjustments are sequential, I'm referring to the dependency relationship among them not how the edits are actually applied when you export an image.  For example, you can select the sky, then apply a gradient to part of the sky, then make adjustments only to the part of the sky affected by the gradient.  So the edits are additive from your perspective.  Presumably Lightroom will actually apply them according to its own internal logic when you export or print the image.)

Another feature I really like is the ability to attach your own label to each selection in the stack.  That facilitates moving from one selection to another in order to tweak each one as you work toward the final appearance you want.

I've attached an example of an image that I edited using only local adjustments.  The first attachment shows the appearance of the imported raw file in Lightroom's Develop module.  The stack of selections is visible in the upper right corner of the second attachment.  You read it from bottom to top:
  • First, I used Select Subject to select only the heron.  Lightroom made a perfect selection automatically.  I then inverted the selection so that I now had a selection that included everything except the heron.  I labeled this "background."
  • Next, I used a Luminance Range to select just the brightest parts of the waterfall (and labeled the selection "waterfall"), then edited that selection to bring out the detail in that part of the water.
  • The next step was to create a selection so I could pull up the shadows in the rocks.  I used another Luminance Range for that.
  • Next, I used Select Subject again, but didn't invert it, so I could make some minor adjustments to the heron.
  • Finally, I wasn't satisfied with the detail in the water below the falls at the lower left of the image, so I used a brush to select it and made some adjustments to that area.
After I had made initial edits for each of the selections, I went back to tweak several of them a bit.  It only dawned on me after the fact—I was playing with this file to figure out how the new masking feature worked—that I never made any global adjustments to the image.  Also, despite the use of machine learning to select and invert the subject, all the adjustments were non-destructive and could be modified at any time.

The entire process took about five minutes.  When I originally edited this image back in 2012, I probably spent several hours working on it in Photoshop.

Don.H

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Re: New masking in LR coming out
« Reply #37 on: October 26, 2021, 08:37:01 pm »

Thumbs up on the new masking scheme. This makes it much easier to create and edit multiple local adjustments and to keep track of what I've done to an image. Not full Layers by any means, but a lot closer in an important way!.

But I do have a question: The Select Subject command seems to pick the most prominent foreground object - does anybody know of a way to direct the tool to ignore its first choice of subject and look in a different portion of the image? 

The Adobe documentation does not seem to offer this, and I've done a few tests (far from exhaustive) running select subject as a subtraction from another mask and running select subject after cropping out the the automatic subject - but with no change to the selected subject. It appears the select subject process is only run on the entire image.
 
Thanks for any inputs.

Don
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simon.garrett@iee.org

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Re: New masking in LR coming out
« Reply #38 on: October 27, 2021, 05:02:35 am »

I've found the same: subject select always looks at the whole image, even if you crop first.

Another issue: I've found that Shift + O to change the colour of the selection overlay doesn't work.  I have to click the coloured rectangle in the mask panel.  However, that does reveal other useful options, including a wider range of colours for the mask, and being able to toggle between showing the area affected by the mask, and the area unafffected.  Alt + O to give different mask presentations (like Photoshop) is great too. 

A bit of learning needed, and perhaps some tweaking in the next Lightroom update. 
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PeterAit

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Re: New masking in LR coming out
« Reply #39 on: October 27, 2021, 11:47:10 am »

Here's my first and, I think, very successful use of the new masking tool. I show before and after images. I used sky select and reduced the exposure. Then I used subject select and increased saturation and luminance on the chairs. I am impressed. I also love the customizable metadata.
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