By Chris Malinao
Let's break these down: Range, masks, Lightroom.
1) Lightroom, of course, is the best workflow software for the photographer. If you shoot a lot of photos, even smartphone photos, Lightroom can be useful. (But why use only a smartphone if you love taking photos? Use a DSLR camera, or one of those mirrorless wonders! But I digress.) The point is: Lightroom is the best workflow app if you shoot photos.
2) Masks. This is how you select areas in your photos, much like selections in Photoshop. You mask an area – use any of the local adjustment tools in Lightroom (Graduated Filter, Radial Filter, or the Adjustment Brush) – and apply your edits to that area (exposure, texture, saturation, etc.).
3) Range means you have the ability to control and fine tune your edits in that selected area, and you control these in terms of luminance (don't let that scare you, it's simply how dark or bright an area is, exposure), or color.
Did I just lose you there? There's something important that we have just encountered in 3. See, when we apply a local edit in 2 by using the adjustment brush, for example, we already have the ability to apply our edits in the area that we brushed on; we are able to affect exposure, contrast, texture, etc. to that area.
But get this: in addition to the above, we can still fine-tune our edits to apply only to either 1) the luminance or 2) color that we define. And that is just absolutely brilliant!
In the example in Fig. 1, I brushed on the wall (Fig. 1-2) using the Adjustment Brush and came down to the option to select the Range Mask (Fig. 1-1) and chose Luminance. So, essentially, I'm telling Lightroom to apply my edits – whatever sliders I moved – only on the range of luminance that I specify in the Range values.
This is also what I did to edit the sky (Fig. 1-4). I selected the whole sky by brushing on it (You may also use the graduated filter to do this). Then I specified its range by moving the right slider on Range toward the left so as not to adversely affect the highlights in the clouds which are already quite bright. The Smoothness slider controls the intensity of the masking effect from hard to soft.
In the case of the tree foliage (Fig. 1-3), I brushed on the leaves and assigned Color to the Range Mask.
When you use Color as your range mask, you need to tell Lightroom which range of colors you want to affect by using the eyedropper tool. In our example above, I clicked the eyedropper tool on the lightest green, then pressing the Shift key on the keyboard, I clicked again on the darkest green. The Amount slider gives us more precision with what we are masking. To see it in real time, press the ALT key as you drag the slider. The image turns into black and white, and you see the masked areas in black. Once you’ve set your mask, you can then apply your edits by moving the editing sliders.
What this gives us – both the luminance and color masking – are highly precise control where we apply our edits. We can specify what areas we will be editing by specifying the luminance values, or by assigning the color values in our masks. And that can only be a good thing.
We will note here that you cannot use both the luminance and color range masks in the same local adjustment tool at the same time. But you can make a new local adjustment (or duplicate one) and layer the masks as many times as you want.
We hope this article brings you much closer to understanding how to use the Range Mask in Lightroom. We encourage you to give this a try and understand it more by looking at the other tutorials on range masking on the internet. It is really quite easy, and once you get accustomed to it, you will see that range masking can yield some impressive results.