Anyone editing a RAW photo with Ligh­t­room for the first time will be surprised at how much contrast, colour and detail they can get out of their images. Simply go through the sliders from top to bottom and see what happens, to put it bluntly. If it gets better, great; if not, reset it. Once you’re done, you’ll already be thin­king, ‘Wow!’ 

But if you leave it at that, you’re leaving a lot of your photos’ poten­tial untapped. Because the actual image editing begins with the mask tool in Ligh­t­room(*), or other soft­ware, such as Luminar Neo(*) really gets going. 

The simple mask tools certainly include the radial gradient filter, the linear gradient filter and the brush tool. For some time now, however, it has also been possible to mask by colour ranges and lumi­nance ranges, i.e. bright­ness ranges. Addi­tional AI-supported masks have been added, such as sky, land­scape and person selec­tion, etc.

The right strength is then deve­loped by skilfully combi­ning these masks. Subtrac­ting a linear gradient from the sky can imitate an ND gradient filter, which outshines any analogue ND gradient filter, as the latter would unfa­vour­ably darken distinc­tive elements in the land­scape. Alter­na­tively, the inter­sec­tion between bright areas of the image and the brush tool is a perfect dodge and burn tool.

The possi­bi­li­ties are endless, so it’s important to explore them. In the video below, you can see a few ways to combine masks. You can also see how big the diffe­rence between purely global and global with selec­tive adjus­t­ments can be. So be sure to take a look.