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Introduced back in 2021 and having seen a raft of updates since, the Masking panel has been one of the best improvements to Lightroom and Photoshop plugin Camera Raw in recent years. Intelligent AI-powered tools allow us to isolate intricate objects or backgrounds with a couple of clicks, without any need to spend time painstakingly masking out areas by hand. In particular, portrait lovers have been treated to an array of masking features that enable us to target parts of a face or body with ease.
Enhancing portraits is often about making delicate changes to different parts of a face, perhaps to lift the whites of the eyes, boost the iris or soften the skin. Previously, these kind of local adjustments would require manual masking with a brush, but now we’re offered a list of attributes that can be targeted automatically, like hair, skin or eyes. Once targeted, we can make changes to the area using an array of tonal tools that now include Curves. As such, we can make a series of powerful local adjustments to our portraits, and like all Raw edits made in Camera Raw or Lightroom, these changes remain non-destructive and endlessly editable.
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