Mastering Lightroom Classic Masking Tools

Learn the Masking panel properly, once
The Masking panel arrived in Lightroom Classic 11 and quietly replaced the Graduated Filter, the Radial Filter and the Adjustment Brush with a single system that does far more than all three combined. It also buried a great deal of genuinely useful behaviour behind icons, badges and flyout menus that nothing in the application ever explains. That is why so many photographers make one Linear Gradient, one Select Sky mask, and stop there.
 
This Lightroom Classic masking guide explains all of it. Mastering Lightroom Classic Masking Tools is a 78-page illustrated PDF covering every mask type in the Develop module, how a mask is built from components, and how to combine those components into selections that hold up on real photographs rather than on tidy examples.
 
I wrote it for camera club members and keen hobbyists who already know their way around the Develop module and the Basic panel, but who open the Masking panel and find the sheer number of options off-putting. There is no filler and no re-explaining of things you already know. Every behaviour described has been checked in the application, including the ones Adobe has changed and the old tricks that no longer work.
 
What the guide covers
Me:et the Masking panel. Finding it, the two different faces it shows you and why, how the panel is organised, naming your masks, every option in all three flyout menus, and the overlay modes that let you see what you have actually selected.
The manual masking tools. Linear Gradient, Radial Gradient and Brush in full, including feathering, Auto Mask, the Invert checkbox, and dealing with subjects that protrude beyond a gradient.
AI-powered masks. Select Subject, Select Sky, Select Background, Select People, Select Landscape and Select Objects: what each one is actually good at, how to refine an AI mask with the manual tools, and where the AI reliably struggles.
Luminance Range and Colour Range masks. How each one reads your image, building them step by step, controlling edge softness, and the important detail about what these masks see at each point in your edit.
Combining masks. Add, Subtract and Intersect used together, component stacking order and why it changes the result, plus keeping a complex edit organised so you can still understand it a week later.
Three complete worked workflows. A landscape edit separating sky, foreground and midtones, an architectural window pull, and a portrait built around subject separation and skin refinement.
A full keyboard shortcuts reference for the entire masking workflow, on one page, for Windows and Mac.
 
Buy it, download it, and have the Masking panel make sense by the end of the afternoon.