Photoshop How To

Adobe has been busy over the past two months with significant updates to Lightroom. And with all the powerful enhancements it’s easy to overlook a few powerful tools for improving and speeding up the editing process.

In the very helpful tutorial below from one of our favorite instructors you’ll learn what he says are “the brand new Lightroom tools you never thought you needed.” So listen up, check out how to use these enhancements, and improve your processing workflow today.

Professional landscape pro Mark Denney is also an image-editing expert, offering expert advice for all sorts of outdoor photography. One of the tools that caught his eye is a much-needed level of organization to masking, while the other provides a new masking tool for detecting key elements that might go unnoticed.

Denney insists that with the addition of these recent enhancements “it’s safe to say that Lightroom has never been as powerful and user-friendly than it is right now.” The first “game-changer” discussed in this episode is an organizational capability alluded to above, that resides in the Masking panel.

As Denney explains, the panel is now structured in logical sections, with everything you need for a particular task in close proximity, whereas in the past you were confronted one long list of sliders for various purposes. Equally helpful is the fact you can now toggle sliders on and off for the specific mask you’re making. It’s also possible to make all of the sections visible with a single click.

If you look very closely at Denney’s demonstration image you’ll see a person on the road in the foreground of his shot, and he considers this element “one of the most important aspects of this photograph.” Unfortunately, the individual is so small and dark relative to the rest of the scene that Lightroom can’t find her when he chooses the Select People option. This is where the second new tool discussed in this episode really saves the day.

Here’s a hint: with the new Select Object capability you can use Lightroom’s AI engine to “literally create a mask for anything in an image.” There’s much more to see on Denney’s YouTube channel so be sure to take a look and subscribe.

And don’t miss the tutorial we posted from another expert recently, explaining how to improve landscape photos by choosing the best angle from which to shoot.