Speed Masking in Lightroom makes your masking 10x better.

If you’re not using my Elegance Speed-Masks and don’t want to, then you need to make your own. So I’ll show you. This is the only way you should be masking in Lightroom. You get better masks about 10x faster. I mean that 100%!

In today video I’ll show you how to make your own Speed Mask presets and the latest update to my own local adjustments preset pack, Elegance 4.

Lightroom’s powerful masking tools can be slow and cumbersome. But now with Speed Masks

You can get the Elegance 4.5 presets here. And if you already have Elegance 4, this is a free update so login and grab it.

Control what you want.

Masking in Lightroom takes a lot of forms and sometimes it transforms everything while others it’s as simple as controlling tone in a sky.

IN this case I use Street’ist presets for the main look and just dialed back the sky using an Ai speed preset. INtersecting grads into you Ai sky selections like I do in Elegance 4.5 makes thenm more natural.

Control 10 layers at a time.

As I showed in the video with this we had all these layers and by using them as a Speed-Mask develop preset you’ll be able top adjust them as one turning the effect intensity up or down. This is a huge control boost for masks in general that most people don’t even know they are missing if they don’t use the Speed Mask presets.

Don’t go too far with masks.

No matter what app you edit with, going too far on a masked edit is the sure fire way to make a photo look fake. In in a time when Ai is creating fakes of everything, I think natural is a good thing.

You should isolate your background but that doe snot mean darken it two stop. Remember Masking is to digital what burning and dodging was in the darkroom. use it wisely.

You can see in this wedding photo how we used the Ai masks but more for atmosphere than to isolate one thing. The mix allows us to us the master slide to decide how far we wanted that to go.

Have fun with these and let me know what you think – Gav