From the course: Photoshop 2024 Essential Training

Using the masking tools to adjust a portion of an image - Photoshop Tutorial

From the course: Photoshop 2024 Essential Training

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Using the masking tools to adjust a portion of an image

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- [Instructor] Previously we've made global adjustments to our images in Camera Raw, meaning that the adjustments have affected the entire photo. But now we're going to see how to use the masking tools in order to make adjustments to selective areas in our image. I'll choose the waterfall and the lighthouse and the glacier lagoon and then open them in Camera Raw. And let's start with the waterfall. I think overall the exposure is too bright, so in the Edit stack I'm going to use the light panel to just decrease the exposure about a stop. Then to access the masking tools, I'll click the Mask icon and we have the option to select the subject, sky, background and objects. And all four of those masks are AI driven, so they use artificial intelligence in order to help us to make our masks, but we can also manually create masks using the brush and the linear gradient and the radial gradient. So let's start with the linear gradient. As soon as I select that we get the masking panel as well as all of the different options that we can use to change areas of the image. I want to darken down this area up here. So I'm going to click and start dragging into the image area. Now all of the areas that have the red overlay are the areas that are going to be affected, and I can reposition this mask, I can rotate this mask, and I can increase or decrease the length of the linear gradient, so the transition area between the area that's going to be affected and the area that's not. So let's just put this up at the top here of the image and just rotate it a bit more and reposition it. Then I'm going to darken the area a little bit by just moving down the exposure and let's add a little bit of color by increasing the temperature. I'll also add a little bit of contrast. You'll notice that as soon as I started making the adjustments, the red overlay was automatically hidden, but we can see that again by either choosing to show the overlay or by positioning our cursor on top of the mask for the linear gradient. Alright, let's rename this. I'll just double click on it and call this darken top so that I know what the mask is. If I need to, I can grab the grabber handle and reposition this if I need to see an area of the image. For now, I'll go ahead and just put that back. Now I'd like to darken these waterfalls and just bring a little bit more attention to them. So I'll create another mask by clicking on the blue plus icon and choosing my brush. We can change the size of the brush as well as the feather or the hardness of the brush. The flow determines how fast the effect builds up, and then the density would cap the amount of the effect that I apply. Every time you create a new mask, the sliders are going to reset automatically. So when I start painting over this area, we'll start to see that red overlay. I can use the left bracket key to get a little bit smaller of a brush and just paint over these areas. And then at any time, we can start making our adjustments. So here, I'll just decrease the exposure a little bit and then either use the dehaze in order to get rid of a little bit of that haze or the clarity slider to just add a little bit more definition. I can continue painting after I've made the adjustments in different areas to just add them to this area of the water and the rocks and this waterfall, and then maybe right over here as well. If you paint too much in an area or in the wrong area, you can switch from the painting tool to the erasing tool. So now I can paint over those areas to remove them. I can also stay with the paintbrush and if I paint too much, I can hold down the Option key or the Alt key on Windows, and that will toggle me to the eraser. Okay, I'd like to darken down some of the area here in the foreground, specifically over on the left side and this front area. I could do it with a brush, but let's take a look at the radial gradient. I'll select the Radial gradient option and then click and drag out my gradient. We can reposition this using the pin. We can also rotate it and we can expand it, or we can make it smaller by just dragging on one of the white dots. It can go off the canvas, that's fine, but we see that the area that's going to be affected is in the inside of the radial gradient. So I'm going to change that by inverting it. So now everywhere outside of the gradient is going to be affected. I'll go ahead and use my exposure slider and just darken that down and add a little bit of dehaze. Now I like what it's doing in the foreground and along here, but there's too much happening up here and I want to remove that. Well, so far in our masks, they've only contained one component. For example, here I just use the brush tool, and here we'd only use the linear gradient, but I can combine more than one tool in a single mask. I can use the Add to add a tool or Subtract because I want to get rid of the effect up here, I'll use Subtract, choose my Linear Gradient, and then click and drag down from the top to remove the gradient from those areas. Or we could undo that, and if we want a little bit more control, I could choose to subtract using the brush tool, get a larger brush, and then start painting in the areas that I want to remove the effect of the radial gradient. So when I'm finished painting, we can see now by hovering our cursor over the radial gradient, the red area is what's being affected. However, I'm subtracting the area that I painted with the brush and the resulting mask looks like this, so all the areas in red are being affected. I'm going to go ahead and show the overlay just so that I make sure that I get all of these areas around the outside of the image. All right, then I'll go ahead and hide the overlay and we can view a before and after by clicking on the Eye icon. Excellent, let's move to the lighthouse. And here I want Camera Raw to create the masks for me. I'll start by selecting the lighthouse by choosing Select subject. We get the Masks panel and we can see that the lighthouse has the red overlay. I'm going to increase the exposure slightly and add a little bit of contrast. Then I'll return to the blue plus icon, and this time I want to select the sky. Camera Raw selects the sky, we see the overlay, and in this case I want to darken it down just a little bit and let's make it a little bit more yellow and also add a bit of dehaze. Finally, I want to adjust this foreground area, but to do it, I'm going to use a combination of masks. I'll click the plus icon and then select Background, which is basically the opposite of select subject, but because I don't want the sky to be masked, I'll use subtract and then select Sky. So now only the foreground will be affected. I want to make it a little bit more green and also just lighten it a bit using the exposure slider. Now I see an area over here, so I'm going to tap Z to select the Zoom tool and zoom in. And this area around the lighthouse, it looks like it didn't quite grab enough. So if we go back to mask one, which is the select subject, and we show the overlay by positioning the cursor on top of the mask, we can see there are some red areas there that are being affected that I don't want to be. So at any time you can come back to any mask and alter it. I'll choose Subtract, and then select the Brush. I'll get a smaller brush by either using the left bracket or I can use the scroll bar on my mouse. And then I'm just going to drag my brush to paint to subtract these areas from the mask. And it looks like there's another little area right down here, so I'll get rid of that as well, excellent. Let's fit in window or fit on screen and take a look at before and after. Alright, one more image because I want to show you the select objects in the masking. So I'll choose objects, and because this photograph is all about negative and positive space, I'm going to use the rectangular select option and drag around this first piece of ice. Camera Raw will automatically select that and I want to make it lighter because it's against a darker area of the background. Then I can choose to Add and I'll select Objects again and drag around the second piece of ice. As soon as I release the cursor and it selects it, we could see that it got lighter. Then I want to create a new mask because I want to make this iceberg darker. So I'll choose the plus, select Objects again, drag my cursor and the rectangle over that ice, and then I can decrease the exposure to darken it down. Again, we can preview before and after. Alright, let's click Done and we can see all of the settings being applied in bridge. As you can see, the masking tools in Camera Raw are a powerful way to make adjustments to only a portion of your image.

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