Selection changing options: Add and Subtract - Lightroom Tutorial

- So at this point we are starting off with a very, very good mask. But there are going to be situations where we're going to need to edit or adjust the masks that the AI has created for us. And that's perfectly fine. I call that hybrid masking. Okay, so we're using one initial tool and then we're using a subsequent tool or a supporting tool to edit that mask in a certain way. Whether we are taking something away, whether we are adding something, or whether we are using two different tools overlapping one another to create a unique mask for a certain situation. Okay, so those are the three options that we have next. We have add, if you're adding something to the mask. Like say, we got the subject, but we didn't get the umbrella, so we need to add the umbrella to our select subject mask. That would be adding. Then we have the option for subtract. So say we want the sky, but we don't necessarily want the top of the sky where it's darkest or something like that. You know, we would subtract that area. The third one is intersect. This one's a little bit harder to find and I'll show you where to find it. What it is, is it's basically using a primary mask of let's say select sky, okay? So you're going to select the entire sky, but you don't want the clouds to also be in that selection, okay? You only want the blue sky to be in that selection. So what you can do is you can use select sky and then you can use the color range. And if you intersect those two masks then you are left with a very intricate, very detailed selection of the area that you want. So let me show you where those things are. I'm going to hit D to come back into my developed module. I'm going to activate my masking, and here we are from our last section. We have our mask of the subject, we have our mask of the sky, and we have our mask of the background. So I'm not going to use the background mask. So for this, I'm going to come in here, find my background mask. I'm going to click on the three dot menu, and I'm going to choose to delete Mask 3 because I know I'm not going to use that. I'll select Mask 2, which is my sky. If you have this mask, this layer item condensed, you don't necessarily see that you used select sky to make this selection. So you can come in here and you can actually rename this if you want sky mask. And that allows you to know exactly what it is even when this mask is condensed. So we need to subtract from this sky mask because we'd like to darken the clouds, make them a little bit more ominous, but we we don't want to darken the cloud that is within the umbrella, that's sweeping the umbrella away. That should be the brightest because it is actually the light source of the composite. So I'd like to subtract that cloud from this mask knowing what we're going to do next, knowing the adjustments that we're going to make. So I'm going to choose my subtract button. Then we get a fly out menu that says, well, how, which tool would you like to use to make your subtraction? So for that, I'm going to choose the radial gradient. Okay, so we'll choose the radial gradient, and I'm going to come on over here, and I'm going to just subtract this cloud from our "sky mask." So I like the way that that looks. I'll go ahead and press okay. And if I come back over here to my sky mask, you can see two different things. It's really nice because it lines it up for you, so that you can see exactly how you got to your hybrid mask. We started with a selection of our sky, and then we subtracted a radial gradient from that selection, and we got to this final hybrid mask. So now that we have this we are ready to make our adjustments. Now, you may be saying, why is it so red? Why is everything so red over this specific area? Now this has to do with showing the overlay. Because of the way Lightroom works, there's no way to actually see the area that has been selected unless you have the mask overlay checked, so that you can see the area that is being selected. Now, there are different options here. You could change the visualization from a color overlay to an overlay on black and white. You have a lot of different options here. Image on black and white, image on black, image on white, white and black. If you are a old school Photoshopper and you're used to working in masks this way you can use that as well to visualize it. But that's basically what the different visualizations are. You can also come into your show overlay and change the color, okay? You can change the color to any overlay color you want. So now we can go ahead and scroll down and let's darken the overall sky slightly. And as soon as we darken that, as soon as we make any adjustment whatsoever to this mask by default, our show overlay is going to turn off because there has been a change made to that specific area. All right, so we've darkened the background sky and let's just add some dehaze to really make those clouds look crazy, add a little bit of clarity as well. So if I turn the little light switch on right here on our masks, you can see the difference that we were able to make to our clouds, which really makes the subject pop out and I like it a lot better. So we've done a little bit of a brief overview on all of the ways we can adjust the initial masks that the AI technology creates, right? We've talked about add, we've talked about subtract, and I showed you an example of subtract. We also talked a little bit about intersect, but I'm going to go into a lot more detail in our next video where I'm going to talk about exactly how we create a very intricate mask using that intersect mentality to execute our mask.