Make skies and subjects pop in Lightroom Classic

What’s wrong with this photo?

I used a prime lens with a wide maximum aperture to get a shallow depth of field effect for this simple composition and that part has worked well. But the boat is just a little too dark and the sky is a little too bright. This is a common issue in outdoor photography.

Step 01: Use the Sky mask tool in Lightroom Classic

In Lightroom Classic’s Develop panel, select the Mask tab in the right sidebar, then choose the ‘Sky’ option at the top. Lightroom Classic will automatically identify and mask the sky, with the mask shown here as a red overlay.

Step 02: Try an Exposure reduction

If the sky is too bright, then using the Exposure slider is a good first step, especially if parts of the sky are blown out, because this can recover a lot of missing highlight detail.

Step 03: Try a Tone Curve adjustment too

Simply reducing the exposure for a bright sky may not be enough. Very often it will look better with a contrast increase, and you can do this with the Tone Curve panel. I’ve added a control point to darken the low tones and another to brighten the high tones to create a classic S-shaped curve for increased contrast.

I can see now, though, that adding these global adjustments to the whole sky doesn’t look very natural. The AI sky mask doesn’t fade in adjustments towards the horizon line but just cuts them off dead. So what can you do about this?

Step 04: Intersecting masks

Lightroom Classic has some powerful options for combining masks which can help me out here. If I select the 3-dot icon alongside the sky mask, I get a drop-down menu where I can select the ‘Intersect Mask with’ > ‘Linear Gradient’ option…

Step 05: How intersecting masks work

When I do this the Linear Gradient tool is activated and I can drag down from the top of the sky to ‘fade in’ these sky adjustments so that they are reduced near the horizon to give a more natural effect.

What’s happening is that these sky adjustments are only being applied to areas of the photo where both. the sky mask and the linear mask intersect.

This technique is especially useful if you have objects jutting up into the sky, like trees, buildings, mountains or foreground objects. A regular linear mask would darken the sky but also these objects, but if you intersect these two mask types, then the sky mask will ‘protect’ these objects from adjustment while the linear mask will fade in the sky adjustment more naturally.

Step 06: Subject selection

Now I can try to make the boat ‘pop’ a little more, and for this Lightroom Classic’s Select Subject tool is perfect. This seems to have an uncanny knack of identifying the main subject in a photo and can create very precise and effective masks.

Step 07: Subject enhancement

I’ve used a series of adjustments to make the boat brighter, including an Exposure increase, reduced Highlights to control the sheen on the upper surface, a Shadows adjustment to bring out the darker tones near the keel and a Clarity increase to add some ‘punch.

Before and after comparison

My original photo is on the left and the edited version is on the right. I think it’s a big improvement and really brings out the light and the colors as they appeared at the time. The secret here, as is often the case with photo editing, was to separate the key areas of the scene to enhance them individually, rather than trying to apply global adjustments across the whole image.

This edit uses AI masking which should adapt well to most outdoor scenes with skies and recognisable subjects. It may work perfectly on your photos without any further modification, but if you do need to modify anything, remember that all the adjustments are contained in two masks called ‘ Subject’ and ‘Sky with grad’. Remember too that this preset has an Amount slider. Once you’ve clicked on it to select it in the Preset panel, you can use the slider to adjust the strength of the effect on your photo.

If you don’t currently use Adobe Lightroom but like what you see, check out the different Adobe Photography Plan options below. I doesn’t affect the price you pay, but I am an Adobe affiliate so I may get a small commission if you click through from this site.