Amazing Lightroom Editing Trick! Range Mask Hack

A crazy simple + super handy editing trick using the Lightroom Range Mask

In this Lightroom tutorial I’m going to walk through an editing trick using the range mask that blew my mind! Use Lightroom’s range mask to achieve this amazingly simple trick and radically improve your edits while turbo boosting editing speed.

Lightroom’s range mask has many uses. You can use it to recover highlights from an overly bright sky, or bring back shadows that are too dark – But its much more powerful than that. You can also use the range mask to quickly apply extremely selective edits to different parts of your image. 

When you’ve been using Lightroom for years, its not super often you come across new editing tricks. Its even more rare you come across an editing hack that has the potential to radically change your editing workflow. That’s why I’m so excited to share this editing technique with you guys as its a total game changer.

You might have heard of dodging and burning before when it comes to photo editing in photoshop and lightroom.

Normally this is done manually by taking an adjustment brush and increasing or decreasing the exposure and brightness selectively in areas of your image to shape the light in your photo. Doing this adds contrast and pop to your images without making them look over edited.

The problem with traditional dodging and burning in Lightroom is that it

A) Takes FOREVER

B) Sometimes looks unnatural / overdone.

Enter this Lightroom range mask editing trick.

Simply apply a range mask in Lightroom to have Lightroom automatically mask out areas of brightness and darkness, and then instantly dodge and burn your image perfectly in just a couple clicks.

This photo example would take FOREVER to dodge and burn the mountains because you’d have to burn every little crevice and feature, while dodging every little outcrop – This kind of detailed work takes a LONG time.

The beauty of this editing trick / technique is how simple it is. It makes your workflow far more efficient, and can be used in all sorts of creative ways.

For instance, in addition to classic dodging and burning, you can use this technique to selectively add color, saturation or sharpening to areas of your image. Touching up portraits is a breeze – Just range mask the bright portions of your image (skin) and pull back the clarity + texture to instantly smooth skin. Then grab another range mask and selectively add some dehaze, texture and saturation to the shadows to add detail and pop to eyebrows, hair, eyelashes and eyes. There are a million ways to use this technique to improve your photo editing!

If this Lightroom editing tip was helpful for you, can you do me a huge favor? Leave a comment below!

If you’re a pinterest user, pin this tutorial to one of your boards.

That’s it for today’s Lightroom tutorial – Have fun editing!