Discover automatic portrait masking

Find out about the clever new face masking tools in Camera Raw and Lightroom

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Introduced in 2021, the Masking panel has been one of the best improvements to Lightroom and Camera Raw in recent years. Now, in the latest major release of Photoshop and Lightroom, the masking panel is even better. Intelligent Al-powered tools allow us to isolate intricate objects or backgrounds with a couple of clicks, without any need to spend time painstakingly masking out areas by hand. In particular, portrait lovers have been treated to an array of masking features that let us target parts of a face or body with ease.

Enhancing portraits is often about making delicate changes to different parts of a face, perhaps to lift the whites of the eyes, boost the iris or soften the skin. Previously, these kind of local adjustments would require manual masking with a brush, but now we're offered a list of attributes that can be targeted automatically, like hair, skin, or eyes. Once targeted, we can make changes to the area using an array of tonal tools that now include Curves. As such, we can make a series of powerful local adjustments to our raw portraits, and like all raw edits made in Camera Raw or Lightroom, these changes remain non-destructive and endlessly editable.

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