From the course: Learning Lightroom

Selecting a subject automatically - Lightroom Tutorial

From the course: Learning Lightroom

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Selecting a subject automatically

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- [Instructor] In the last chapter, we applied adjustments to an entire photo. But what if you want to edit only part of a photo? That's when you'll use a mask to isolate a selected area to edit. If you haven't updated Lightroom recently, go ahead and do that now so you can take advantage of the powerful masking features that I'm going to show you in this chapter. Believe me, it's worth it. Masking really is a game changer, and it totally replaces the older way of editing part of a photo in Lightroom, which was to apply local adjustment tools directly. In this movie, I'll show you how to use select subject to automatically select the main subject in a photo and edit it separately from the rest of the photo. So in this photo, the subject is backlit by the bright light source behind him. This often happens when you take a picture of someone in front of a window. You may have already applied some global edits, but now you want to brighten the subject without affecting the background at all. This is the perfect situation for a mask. So go to the bar on the right and click the masking icon here. That opens this list of tools that you can use to create a mask. You may recognize some of these like brush and linear gradient and radio gradient if you've worked in Lightroom before. We'll cover some of these later in the chapter. The two options at the top of this list, select subject and select sky, are easiest to use because they automatically make a mask for you using artificial intelligence or AI. So let's say we want to select the subject in this image. All we have to do is click select subject. That created another panel, the masks panel. If I hover over that panel, you can see a red overlay that represents the mask that Lightroom just created. So now that you have a mask, all you have to do is apply one or more adjustments to the masked area. To do that, go to this column on the right that contains a list of adjustments. Some of these will probably look familiar to you because they're the same adjustments that we covered in the last chapter when we were talking about applying adjustments to a whole photo. So now we're going to apply some of these to just part of the photo, the masked part of this photo. Let's start by going to the exposure slider and dragging that over to the right to brighten the subject, and notice that affected only the subject, not the background. To add a little contrast, you could use the highlights, shadows, whites and black sliders like we learned to do in the last chapter. But to keep things simple, I'm just going to drag the contrast slider over to the right. And let's add some color saturation too by going down to the saturation slider and dragging that one over to the right. So that's pretty much all there is to the basics of adjusting part of a photo with a mask. To recap, you used select subject to automatically create a mask that isolates the subject and then you applied adjustments that affect only the masked area. When you're done, you would usually leave mask mode by going back to the bar on the right and clicking the masking icon. But let's stay here for the next movie, so I can introduce you to some more masking features here in Lightroom.

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