Today we’re going to cover a feature that I think all of you who use masking tools will love. It’s been one of the most requested features I’ve seen and I’m glad it’s finally here. Unfortunately, it’s not in Lightroom yet but hopefully it makes its way there soon. Enjoy!
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Great tip
Thanks for sharing, Matt. Selecting trees from the background has always been a bit of a headache, so this feature looks very promising. Hopefully we’ll see it in Lightroom soon as well. It’s a little odd that Adobe introduced it in Camera Raw first, since Lightroom is where most photographers would expect to see it.
Thanks JT. Adobe seems to be doing it more and more lately so who knows. Definitely enough to be a trend though now that Depth Masks, and the feather refinement is in there and not in Lightroom.
Camera Raw is the Edit/Develop Engine powering the Lightroom clients. New Edit features must be built in Camera Raw before the Lightroom clients can adopt them. Unburdened by the additional cataloging, syncing, and other workflow functionalities, Camera Raw can move more quickly to get these desired new features into your editing workflow. Our goal is to eventually port these features into the Lightroom clients.
Totally understand Rikk. I guess, from the standpoint of long time LR and PS users, this is not what we’ve experienced in the past up until the last couple of years. Traditionally LR and ACR have been updated together. In 20 years of using LR, I can’t ever recall wishing I was an ACR user before the last year or so. Thanks for the info though and I’m sure the team is doing everything they can to get the features in to LR so I’m looking forward to it.
Thanks Matt hope it comes to Lightroom soon
Great piece of info thank you 🙏🏻
Great explanation. Thank you
Helpful demonstration, thanks Matt. I agree — it’s surprising this hasn’t created much buzz.
Great features, thanks for sharing. I hope it’ll get pushed to LR as well.
Great video, Matt, appreciate learning this. I have a question about Bridge – I’m an LR user (LR Classic), and I’ve been using it since 2014. I’ve never been able to figure out why or why not I should consider using Bridge – do you have a class or video that discusses this? I read the previous comments and two people said they are Bridge users. Is it worth it to look at Bridge and what happens to my LR catalog if I decide I should switch to Bridge?
Hi Milada. You shouldn’t be using Bridge. You’re a Lightroom user so you have a program that is already doing this. Some people just prefer it, but they are the minority as most photographers use Lightroom. Thanks.
Excellent presentation and excellent explanation of the new features. Thanks, Matt. Much appreciated.
Thank you. Looking forward to seeing you at the Lightroom Virtual Summit next week.
The masking feather is a great feature. Thanks for explaining it so well.
In response to your Bridge comment … I must admit, I’m a Bridge/Camera RAW/Photoshop user because I developed my workflow over the years since the mid-1990’s. I was a Lightroom beta tester way back when and used it a lot, at first. Then I found the catalogue system to be cumbersome, as well as adding metadata. So I went back to Bridge for selecting, labeling, and metadata. I don’t use automated culling or batch processing because that just creates a need to review the results. If I edit myself, it’s done, magazine quality, and syndicated.
And I absolutely love that Camera RAW is now available in Photoshop, but they need to make it non-destructive.
Ditto to Lee. I quit LR after version 3 for Aperture, later Capture One. I’ve gone full circle back to Bridge as my first step for sorting, keywording and then going into ACR to PS or open in ON1 for its unique effects. Having used PS since version 2, it’s still my cornerstone.
Hi. Camera Raw is non destructive for your raw photos.