Photoshop How To

Landscape photographer Mark Denney is someone who is really enjoying Adobe's recent update to Lightroom. In fact, he likes one feature so much, he just made a video calling it the best new set of editing tools in Lightroom for developing landscape photos.

"I don't usually get this excited about software updates, but the new Lightroom update has got me pretty ramped up," Denney says.

"I actually haven't been this excited since the initial introduction of range masks a few years ago. And I must admit I never thought Adobe would enable this level of control and precision in Lightroom as I felt they would want to reserve this detail for Photoshop, but what a welcome surprise this has been."

In particular, Denney thinks the new masking feature in last week's update to Lightroom that lets you target the sky or the ground separately is a potential game-changer for landscape image editing.

"What's really neat is this right here," Denney points out in the below video while editing one of his landscape photos. "I'm going to come up here and I'm going to create a new mask again and we're going to come up to 'select sky' but this time, we're going to hit these three little dots right here to the right of 'sky,' and we're going to invert this mask. And what that did, it is removing the sky and it's only targeting the ground. And I think that is super cool because within seconds we were able to create a mask just for the sky and within secondd we were able to create a mask just for the ground."

Watch below as Denney demonstrates why this new feature is so effective for helping bring out gorgeous detail in both the sky and the ground while editing landscape photos. After you view the video, you may want to get the latest Lightroom update immediately if you haven't already.

"You can see what a dramatic difference was made only using two masks in an extremely short amount of time," he concludes.