Level up your editing with these masking tips

Masking is one of the most essential parts of editing in my opinion.

With masking you can create light sources, local adjustments, custom vignettes and much more.

It is the phase that really makes your image pop and makes it unique.

Here are my favourites tips to level up your masking game!

The basics

There’s many parts when it comes to masking but let’s go through the basics of masking first to get the right idea.

The main point of masking is guiding the viewers eye to the right place. This means lighting, shadows, local adjustments and much more.

With masking, you can save a flat and boring looking photo and turn it into something interesting and beautiful.

Creating light sources

Arguably one of the most important parts of masking is creating light sources.

This is actually very easy. The key is to use the dehaze slider.

I often find myself using -10 Dehaze when creating light sources. If I want a little more soft light, I’ll also decrease the clarity.

For some cases, you can also adjust the temperature of the mask.

There’s not much more when it comes to creating light sources. It all comes down to experimenting and playing around with these settings to create the perfect light source for you.

Guiding the viewers eye

To make a photo interesting and pleasing to look at we need to guide the viewers eyes to the right place.

This depends a lot on the photo but generally it’s the middle part of the image or the subject.

I always use a linear gradient mask with decrased exposure at the bottom of my image to start.

Then I use one, or multiple inverted radial gradient masks to create a custom vignette. You can also use a large brush for this for even more customization.

Next, I try to highlight the subject more. I make a mask of the subject and increase the exposure. Most of the time I also create a radial gradient on the subject to avoid harsh edges.

Try to avoid too extreme edits on the subject, because it can easily look unrealistic and we don’t want that.

How to achieve soft glow

This is a specific effect but I really, really enjoy it and I'd like you to know it too.

To achieve soft glow, create a linear gradient mask covering the whole image. Then subtract the shadows with the luminance picker tool.

Now you should have a mask with only highlights selected.

Then go into the effects and decrease clarity to something between -20 to -30 and increase texture to between 20 to 30.

Now, you have created soft edges for highlights and achieved the desired soft glow effect.

You can play around with this effect even more by adjusting the temperature and exposure.

More coming soon!

There's definitely more when it comes to masking. I will make more advanced tutorials in the future but I wanted to start with the basics.

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See you next week with another blog post!