Masking has come a long way in LR and C1. Today I’ll pit them against each other. But I’ll also show you the best ways to use masks, how I use Elegance 5 and why masks are actually old school.

My little Masking master Class…

Get Elegance 5 here. Also check out tools I used like Filmist 2 and Natural HDR 5.

The least understood thing in Photograph…

Is TONE! The great Ken Whitmire drilled that into me years ago and it changed everything. For more on that come to my next Shadow Hackers workshop.

Tone is what created separation and depth. It’s Luma value, color values and the way shadow plays with light. It’s the oldest and least understood thing that separates master from amateurs.

Digital kids think all this is new in Lightroom and Capture One. But all that;’s new is the tools available to do it fast. What we’re doing is the same stuff we did in the darkroom.

The little Mask that Could

Masks are just a way to control tone. Not unlike burning and dodging in Photoshop, the saturation brush or the curves tool. Speed masks are just the most effective way to manage them.

There’s a reason I’ve spend years now refining this process. Because if you don’t use Speed-Masks, you might as well skip masking in these apps and do it the old way manually in Photoshop. Yes it’s that slow to do these complex meshed masks manually.

The keep is creating masks combos that direct the tone the way you want and making sure they are dialed in well so you can use them on any image. That’s what I’ve done in Elegance 5 but you can do this your own way as well.

But is Photoshop still better?

Yes and no. For a general workflow Lightroom, Raw or Capture One are better because you can edit all images from sate with the same process and consistency. A film preset, then a speed-mask, then copy the setting to similar images.

In Photoshop pr another layer style editing you get more control. More manual, but more. You can paint in details and move tone. I automate this in PS as well with looks like Alchemist actions and Lumist. T he image refined in Photoshop is MORE refined.

So while it’s fair to say Photoshop is more refined it does not mean it’s better for every image but also you should not ignore it.

In the end and what I hope you see from this video is that shadow and tone are the important factors. These tools are just how to there faster and better.

Gavin Seim

I’m always rooting for competition to Lightroom. It’s good for us. But Adobe seems to be having fun keeping Capture One behind. Why are they a big deal?

New Lightroom Masks are great. But there’s a flaw…

Check out my Elegance speed mask pack and Natural HDR 5

A Battle of Two heavy Hitting Apps

In my Annual Lightroom VS Capture One review, we saw that both are great, but Lightroom gives a lot more for the money. But we are all tired of Adobe’s price hikes and deaf ears. So competition is good.

But AI masking and the ability to automate it in Lightroom is huge, and it just got way better. Every time Capture One does an update, acting like it’s a huge deal, Adobe pushes something new like a cat playing with a mouse.

Sadly, Capture One is falling even further behind in Ai masking. Let’s not even talk about generative fill tools in Lightroom today because I prefer natural images myself. But I do think this competition is good for us, and I’m thankful Capture One is making Adobe work.

You can Ai mask in both apps.

Yes, they are both good. But I make my Elegance Mask pack for both. Speed Masks are essential and let us automate these increasingly complex groups of lawyers. Without them, you might as well go into an app like Photoshop because it will often be just as fast.

The problem is that there are WAY more mask options in Lightroom. So while I am able to make powerful tools in Capture One, Lightroom keys letting us do more, as we see in this big new Landscape mask update that does way more than landscapes.

Why are masks so slow?

There is an Achilles’ heel.

Toward the end of the video, we will talk about the downside. Lightroom masks bring the app to a complete crawl, and years later, they still have not fixed it.

Lightroom is not alone. The more mask features Capture One has, the slower it gets, also. Something is wrong with how they are using system resources in these, because a bunch of active layers in Photoshop work just fine. But Ai masks seem to slow the system with every layer you add.

I’ll share some ideas for how to keep things moving fast despite the masks being a resource hog, but it may be that the first one of these apps to resolve the speed issue will take the lead.

Tell me what you think in the comments – Gavin Seim