Use Lightroom's AI Masking to Select Skies and Subjects Fast

What This Does

Brightening a subject, deepening a sky or separating a person from a background used to mean drawing a selection by hand with a brush or gradient. Lightroom's Masking panel now analyzes the photo and builds that selection automatically, so a targeted edit starts from a ready-made mask instead of a blank canvas.

Before You Start

• You have Adobe Lightroom Classic installed and signed in with your Adobe ID
• Your plan includes Lightroom Classic. Paid plan required, see Adobe's pricing page for current options: https://www.adobe.com/products/photoshop-lightroom/plans.html
• The photo you want to edit is open in the Develop module
• Run Denoise first if the image is noisy. Applying it after masking can shift the mask's result

Steps

1. Open the Masking panel

In the Develop module, select Masking from the tool strip on the right, or press Shift and W together.

2. Choose an automatic selection

For a portrait background swap or a subject-only adjustment, choose Select Subject from the Masking panel. For a landscape or an outdoor session, choose Select Sky instead, or Select Background if you want everything except the subject. A dedicated Landscape option can target specific elements such as vegetation, water or architecture when a scene calls for it.

3. Review the automatic mask

Lightroom studies the photo and builds the selection on its own, showing it to you as a red overlay and adding it to the Masks panel. Toggle the overlay on and check the edges, especially around hair, fingers or a busy tree line, before you apply any adjustment.

4. Adjust and refine

Use the sliders tied to that mask to brighten a face, deepen a sky or cool down a background. If the automatic selection missed a spot or grabbed too much, use Add or Subtract from the Masking panel with any of the manual tools to correct it.

5. Copy the mask across similar frames

For a session shot in one location, copy the mask settings to other frames using Sync, Auto-sync or Copy from Previous. Spot-check each one instead of rebuilding the selection from scratch every time.

Real Example

Scenario: An outdoor family portrait session has a washed-out sky in half the frames.

What you do: Open one frame, choose Select Sky from the Masking panel, and deepen the exposure and add a touch of contrast on that mask alone. Copy the mask and its settings across the rest of the outdoor frames from the same session.

What you get: A consistent, deeper sky across the whole gallery without hand-drawing a gradient mask on each frame or missing the tree line the way a manual selection sometimes does.

Tips

• Always review the mask overlay before adjusting. An automatic selection that clips a hand or misses a stray hair is easier to fix before you build edits on top of it.
• Select Subject and Select People behave differently in a group shot. Try both and pick whichever isolates the right people for the adjustment you want.
• Combine masks. A Select Subject mask to lighten a face and a Select Sky mask to deepen the background can both live on the same photo at once.

Tool interfaces change. If a button has moved, look for similar AI/magic/smart options in the same menu area.