Quick Tip: Use Color Range Masking to quickly make precise selections in Lightroom
Feb 23, 2018
Dunja Đuđić
Dunja Djudjic is a multi-talented artist based in Novi Sad, Serbia. With 15 years of experience as a photographer, she specializes in capturing the beauty of nature, travel, concerts, and fine art. In addition to her photography, Dunja also expresses her creativity through writing, embroidery, and jewelry making.
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Color Range Masking feature is one of the Lightroom improvements Adobe recently introduced. In this video, Benjamin Warde demonstrates this useful feature. He’ll show you how it works and how to use it to make precise selections in Lightroom.
In the photo Benjamin uses as an example, he wants to apply increase clarity in the leaves. When he does it to the entire image, clarity also increases in the background, which doesn’t make the bokeh look very pleasing. On the other hand, masking leaves with the Brush tool could be very time-consuming. This is where Color Range Masking comes to the scene.
You can make a quick and rather imprecise selection with the Brush over the area you want to modify. Then, go to the new Range Mask option and select “Color.”
Choose the Eye Dropper tool, and then click and drag to select the representative range of colors to which you want to apply the modifications. Benjamin selects the color range on one of the leaves, and the result: very precise selection. Now it’s possible to apply the adjustments only to the leaves.
[Lightroom Coffee Break: Make Precise Selections with Color Range Masking | Adobe Photoshop Lightroom]
Dunja Đuđić
Dunja Djudjic is a multi-talented artist based in Novi Sad, Serbia. With 15 years of experience as a photographer, she specializes in capturing the beauty of nature, travel, concerts, and fine art. In addition to her photography, Dunja also expresses her creativity through writing, embroidery, and jewelry making.
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8 responses to “Quick Tip: Use Color Range Masking to quickly make precise selections in Lightroom”
Any tips on how to add color using this method? I’ve seen a couple of videos, but the problem is when I zoom to 100% and it looks horrible as the edges and selection become very harsh and practically unusable. The idea of adding color non-destructive is really cool, but it seems that it only works with very even color spread… any tips are very welcomed??
Will issues obvious at 100% zoom still be obvious unzoomed or at normal viewing distances?
Nope… this method is ok for a FB viewing, small format image.
Photoshop will be quite more accurate with the color balancing + fusion mask created with a color selection
In CO1 that’s was possible a long time ago.
And quite more precisly…
May I ask what editor is CO1?
This has the potential to be really helpful. I’m stoked!
Also, I love the no-nonsense one minute format. I don’t need to hear a whole story, I just need to know how to do the thing.
A good one. Thank you. I also liked the fast and to the point video.