If that previous paragraph made your head spin, I don’t blame you. You can, again, invert any selection, or combine one tool with the inverse of a selection made with another tool. And then you can add, subtract, or intersect that resulting selection with another tool – and so on, as many times as you like, to get exactly the selection you want. You can start with any of the eight selection tools, then add, subtract, or intersect that initial selection with any other tool (or even with the same tool). You’re no longer limited to combining a brush or gradient with one range mask (and only where those two tools intersect or overlap). I did both of those things with this photograph of a kestrel here are before and after versions (“before” on top):Īfter using Select Sky to darken the sky and lighten the foregroundīut the most powerful feature of the new Masking panel might be the ability to combine multiple selection tools in almost unlimited ways to create exactly the selection you want. For photographs of people or animals, for example, you can select your main subject to lighten it and make it stand out, then duplicate that selection, invert it (yes, you can duplicate selections, and invert them as well!), and darken everything else but your subject. They’re not always perfect, but usually pretty darn close. I’ve been working with pre-release versions of the new Masking feature for many months now, and the new Select Subject and Select Sky tools work really well. Also, the Luminance, Color, and Depth Range masks are now separate tools, so you can use them independently, rather than only in combination with a brush or gradient. These are AI-powered methods of automatically selecting the subject or sky in an image.

There are two new selection tools: Select Subject and Select Sky.

And I can quickly turn a mask’s eyeball off and back on (much like Photoshop) to see the effect of that adjustment.īut the new layout is just the beginning.

When I go back to an image I previously worked on, I no longer have to try to remember whether I used the Adjustment Brush, Graduated Filter, Radial Filter, or some combination of those, since I can see all the local adjustments in one place. Like every change, this new layout takes a little getting used to, but I think it’s a big improvement.

Lightroom 2020 new features