[music] [Eva Kosmas Flores] Hey, guys, and welcome to MAX. My name is Eva Kosmas Flores and I'm a photographer, author and educator. And today I'm going to be taking you through how Lightroom's AI Tools can speed up your workflow and also allow you to make changes in your images that you used to only be able to do in camera, which is pretty incredible. So let's go over what we're going to learn together today. So just a quick overview, so you know we're going to walk away with. We're going to dive into Lightroom's AI-Powered Masking Tools first. And we're going to be going over the object mask, the person mask, the subject mask, and the sky mask. And then we're going to go over Lightroom's Firefly-Powered AI Remove Tools that you can easily remove unwanted objects from your frame. And lastly, we're going to dive into applying and adjusting Lightroom's Lens Blur feature to add a really dreamy, shallow depth of field to your captures. So without further ado, let's go ahead and get started. So when you are in Lightroom, you're going to want to dive over on the far right-hand side into the Masking tool. We have this circle with a dotted border around the edges. We're going to click on that. It takes us into our lovely masking area. So one of my personal favorite AI-Powered masks that Lyram has that I use so much, like multiple times in every photo, is the Object Mask tool. So this is really helpful when you have an object, especially if it has an irregular shape or border to it, and you want to mask that object in frame. So in this photo, this bottle of cognac is a little dark. So, you know, I could use the brush tool to manually select it, but instead, let's use Lightroom's AI-Powered Object Mask. So we're going to go ahead and click on the + button. We're going to go down to Objects. We're creating a new mask. We're selecting Object for the object mask, and there are two ways to select the object. So the first one is this little brush. So you don't actually have to do a detailed brush. It's literally a rough tracing around the object and bam, that's it. So you just click and hold down on your mouse and trace the object. And within a second, Lightroom has made a very detailed and very accurate mask of that object for you. But let me show you really quickly the other way. So I'm going to actually delete that mask and so we're going to go click on Create New Mask, select Object, and then we're going to click on this little square instead. So the other way is to click and drag down and just create a little square or rectangle around the object that you want on the mask. And bam. Lightroom has created this beautiful, very detailed mask over the object. So now, I could bring up the shadows, I could bring up the exposure a little bit. I could adjust the color, take the green tint of the grass out of the cognac, and I could even warm it up a little bit, too. So I just love this tool because it just saves so much time and is able to create individual mass of really irregularly shaped objects super quickly. And another one of the very useful AI-Powered masks in Lightroom is the Person Mask tool. A lot of us are editing people. There's a lot of portrait photographers out there, lifestyle photographers. And let's say I wanted to edit my skin tone. This is a really common thing that you edit when you have people in your captures. So let's go ahead and click on the + sign. And we're going to create a mask of people. So we'll click on People. Right now it's detecting people in my frame. Detecting. And there, there it goes. It found me, person number one. The other cool thing is if you have a frame with a bunch of people in it, it will create, like, person one, person two, person three, and you'll be able to create masks of each of those people. But not only are you able to create a mask of the whole person, but if I click on me, it also breaks down mask options of very specific parts of the person. So you could quickly make a mask of just the hair, you could quickly make a mask of just the clothing. Or for this example, let's do facial skin and body skin, because one of the most common things you do as a portrait photographer is smoothing people's skin to make it look all nice. So let's create a mask of just the facial skin and body skin. And we're going to go ahead and hit Create. And so now if we zoom in, let's go ahead and just smooth out the skin a little bit with texture and maybe bring the clarity down a little bit. And so with just literally, like a couple seconds, we were able to make a highly refined, highly focused mask on just the skin of the subject. Whereas back in the day before this mask, this AI mask existed, that was something you would do by hand with the brush tool, and it could take quite a bit of time. So this is such a lifesaver and time saver. And I love using that whenever I am editing people. So amazing AI mask. Let's go over another one. So we're going to hop on over to this photo, actually. So oftentimes we just want to make a mask over our subject. And for this photo, the subject is a little overexposed. So I'd really love to bring the highlights down, but just on the subject. So, we're still in this masking panel in Lightroom. I'm going to go ahead and click on this Subject shortcut, and bam. Lightroom has automatically created a mask, selecting our subject. So I'm going to go ahead and just bring the highlights down. And now I can see so much more detail on these beautiful cookies that were lost before. And instead of having to go and use a radio filter or click and drag it, I just clicked one button and it, bam. Just immediately masked and selected my subject, which is so, so handy.
And then oftentimes, on the flip side, we just want to adjust the background, and we don't want those changes to affect the subject. So, in this photo, our background is pretty saturated. It looks really cool. But let's say I'm like, you know, it's a little distracting. I kind of look at the tablecloth first instead of the cookies. I could go up to the blue + to create a new mask. Now I can select Background, and in, like, less than a millisecond is made a mask of just the background. And now I can go ahead and just bring the saturation down of that a little bit. So I have a nice kind of caramel colored tablecloth. A little less distracting. And now I'm really drawn to looking at the cookies first when I look at this photo instead of the tablecloth.
So let's go over another really handy mask. I know we're on a masking roll, but there's so many good tools. So let's go through all of them. So when you are shooting travel or landscape photography, a common subject is going to be a sunset. And when you are editing a sunset, it's very fun to play with the colors. So let's go ahead and use Lightroom's Sky AI-Powered mask to select the sky in this photo. So I'm just going to click Sky and bam. It automatically selected the sky in less than a second. And the cool part is it's not like a clean sky. There's some dappling tree branch stuff in frame, and it didn't select that, but it did select this little bits of sky visible between the branches, which is incredible, because, again, that would have been very detailed masking work that I would have had to do by hand. And so now I can quickly bring up the saturation. I could bring up some fun little pinks in the sunset. I could really make it super warm and just bring out all these lovely details in the sky. Now, if you've shot sunsets before, you know that as a photographer, you typically expose for the sky, right? Because you want the detail in the sky. And that means a lot of times, the ground, the foreground in the image is usually a bit underexposed. So if you want to quickly select the areas of the frame that are not the sky, we could go up to Create New Mask. We could select Sky and click on these three dots next to it, and then we can invert our sky. And now it selected everything but the sky. And so we can recoup some of those details, boosting up the shadows, even boosting up the exposure, and even bring up the contrast. So we've recouped a lot of detail now in the ground and added and boosted color in our sunset through that AI Sky Mask really quickly. So now that we've gone over some of the really amazing masking tools at your disposal with Lightroom's new AI tools, I would love to take you through Lightroom's Firefly Powered-AI Remove tool. So this is a really cool composition, but let's say I want to remove this candle from frame. I'm like, it looks kind of tall and weird and skinny. I feel like it's kind of distracting. On the far right hand side, we will go click on this eraser icon and go into the remove panel. And we are going to go on the far left and click on that eraser again for remove. And then we're going to click on the generative AI box.
So by clicking the generative AI box, it allows Lightroom to remove objects from the image by using AI to envision what would naturally replace that object in frame. So now that we have generative AI selected, we're going to just roughly draw over the area that has the object that we would like removed. So I'm just selecting the candle here, and you can refine that selection if you want. So if I wanted to remove anything from that, I could click remove and then draw on that part, and it'll take it away and same with add. And so once you've gotten your object selected, we're going to go ahead and hit apply. And then Lightroom's AI is now generating a background and wow, it's gone. It looks amazing. You would never have known that it was there.
Another really great thing too about this mask is it gives you a few variations. So we actually have three variations. We could click through the different variations of the background like this one. It also added the handle in, I don't know if you can see that here. It added the handle from the little knife in the background. That one's a little more soft and out of focus. So you can go through and scroll and pick the one that works best for your image. And you could also hit Refresh and it'll bring you a whole new batch of options as well. So really, really handy tool.
So great at removing objects from frame that you just forgot about when you were on set shooting. And now I really am excited to share this next tool with you. This one is the new lens blur tool that Lightroom has. So we're actually going to go back over to the main editing panel. So it's the icon with all the sliders main editing panel area. And then we're going to scroll all the way down to the bottom and we're going to go ahead and click on Apply under Lens Blur. And what this is going to do is Lightroom's AI is going to add a nice soft, shallow depth of field to this capture. So you could immediately see on those columns, especially this shift here. So I'm going to go ahead and take it away. So that was before and that's after. So now we have this gorgeous soft, shallow depth of field. This is really great if you were shooting with a lens that didn't have a very low aperture setting capability and you still want like a nice soft, shallow depth of field, you can add that later when you're editing. So this really is game changing because not only does it help you if you're like stuck with certain lenses that maybe you're not super jazzed about their settings capabilities, but it also helps you do something in the edit that you used to only be able to adjust in camera, like shooting at a really low aperture to get that super shallow dreamy look. Now you can do it in the edit, which is really incredible. And you can also adjust the blur amount. So let me zoom out a little bit. So it's automatically set to 50 but we could make it even blurrier if we wanted. And then another really cool thing is we can change the shape of the bokeh. So let's actually look at some of these little droplets. And I'm going to go ahead and change the shape. So I don't know if you were able to see that you could change the shape of the bokeh on those little droplets. It's, like, very visible. And so now we have these cool, kind of, like rings. You can also do, like, a little, or I guess this is technically the ring, more of an outline. And then we almost have a little eye effect, like a half moon effect here. So it's really fun to play around with all the different bokeh shapes. And then you can also boost the bokeh as well. And if you want to really visualize where is the line of focus and hone that you can click on Visualize Depth. And so within this white rectangle on the focus range, that is what is in focus. So as we are expanding and shrinking this range, you can see the white area is what is in focus. So if I only want, like, our bird bath to be in focus, I can just kind of drag and pull along the focus range just to kind of tighten it up here. And you can also refine it further. So if we go down under Refinement, we can actually brush the areas that we want either to be in focus or blurred. So let's say I want the whole base of this bird bath to be in focus. I'm going to click on Focus, and now I can go ahead and brush that in and you can see it's turning gold to let me know because I have this gold color area in the focus range inside that little white rectangle. So I know this is the area that is very going to be sharp. So I'm just selecting that so you can actually adjust it by hand and get incredibly precise with where the focus is, which is so awesome. So now I'm going to uncheck Visualize Depth, and now it just shows us our normal picture. But that's how you can really refine the mask or the focus, rather, to really tighten up exactly where the image is going to be dreamy and soft and where it's going to be nice and sharp. So, yeah, I hope you enjoyed this session. I had such a great time hosting it with you. The AI tools within Lightroom are incredible, and they are so game changing and such time savers. So I hope this was inspiring. I hope you're excited to get editing, and I hope you have an amazing rest of your time at MAX. Thank you so much. Bye.
