A critical note on the new landscape masks in Lightroom

Saturday 3 May 2025, 20:10 by Nando Harmsen | 3,566 views | 5 comments

This article was translated from Dutch with the help of AI. Read the original.

The latest Lightroom update (spring 2025) has added landscape masks. Automatic masks are created based on the contents of your photo. They are not limited to landscapes. How useful are they?

Lightroom reads the photo and creates masks based on what it recognises in the photo. There are seven different objects that can be recognised. Think of it as a variation on the automatic masks for people.

People are often reasonably easy to recognise in a photo, just like hair, eyes, faces and so on. That is not always so obvious with a landscape. Atmospheric conditions in particular can blur the boundary between one thing and another.

One of the image elements is architecture. This is (usually) easy to recognise in a landscape, although Lightroom has been rather broad in its selection here.
Not only do atmospheric conditions play a role in the difficulty of the selection. Telling the difference between different elements can be difficult because there is almost never a sharp dividing line.

Here, Lightroom manages to distinguish reasonably well between natural ground and artificial ground. Not all natural elements are included in the selection.
On the whole, the software produces an impressive result. Even in situations where I did not expect it to work well. However, it also often gets things wrong. Sometimes it even produces unusable results.

I have an example of a landscape with a river, mountains, buildings and some foreground vegetation. We can clearly see the difference between the mountains and the foreground vegetation. Lightroom has more trouble with it. Distinguishing between mountains and natural ground in particular proves difficult.

The mountains mask also selects some of the foreground vegetation, as well as the fields on the other side of the river.

Ironically, if you look at the natural ground mask, the mountains are selected, along with the fields. In addition, the mountains and natural ground masks overlap considerably.

The natural ground mask, in turn, mainly shows the mountains as the selection.

There is another aspect to take into account. The selections are often sharply outlined, resulting in abrupt transitions in the masks. In many cases, these are undesirable in landscapes. There is no clear dividing line.

A small edit to the sky and vegetation makes it clear that these sharp transitions almost never work. This is unusable.
The sharp transitions create an unrealistic edit of the photo, which often becomes very clear with transitions from sky to vegetation. In addition, the transitions are rarely accurate enough, resulting in bleed.

There are no sharp transitions in a landscape. This mask is unusable as it is. You have to adjust it.
Of course, it is important to make the transitions very gradual. This produces much more realistic results. It is therefore important to adjust masks and correct them where necessary. Creating mask intersections is an effective tool for this.

A simple mask intersection produces a much more natural result. As it is now, it is usable in an edit. There are no sharp dividing lines.
Bear in mind that the masks Lightroom creates for you can provide an excellent starting point in some cases. However, they are not finished, and adjusting the masks until they are correct will become very important in your workflow.

I used the automatic landscape masks as a basis and adjusted them to make them usable. Creating the masks myself would have been quicker.
If you use the automatic landscape masks in your edit, make sure you correct and adjust them. However, be careful that you do not spend more time correcting them than the result is worth. If it takes too much time, a normal manually applied mask may have been much better.

What do you think of the new landscape masks in Lightroom, Lightroom Classic and Adobe Camera Raw? Have you used them yet, and if so, what do you think of them? Let us know in a comment below this post.

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About the author

Nando Harmsen has been photographing for more than 40 years. He specialises in wedding photography and landscape photography. Nando also gives talks, workshops, masterclasses and photo trips, and regularly reviews new and interesting equipment.

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5 comments

Donald Willemsen wrote on Saturday 3 May 2025 at 23:36 | reply
Adobe is veel te laat op de kar van de Ai gesprongen en hinken nu achterop vergeleken bij sommige andere bewerkingssoftware die al veel eerder het pad van de Ai hebben gekozen. Al die verschillende automatische maskers zijn gebaseerd op Ai modellen. Adobe probeert nu de achterstand, die het heeft, in te halen en komt te snel met updates die nog niet goed functioneren.
Als je al veel moet gaan corrigeren aan die automatische maskers verlies je veel tijd. Het analyseren van je foto door Adobe kost ook de nodige tijd en die tijd had je ook kunnen gebruiken om zelf een masker te maken van het deel in de foto wat je wilt bewerken. Adobe maakt immers maskers aan voor alle onderdelen in de foto tijdens de analyse.
This comment was written in another language and has not been translated yet.

Nando wrote on Monday 5 May 2025 at 13:40 | reply
Waarom altijd die belerende vinger over 'te laat ingesprongen en achterop hinken', en meer van dat soort dingen? Als de software je niet bevalt, of je vindt iets dat beter werkt, gebruik dat dan.
Jij maakt er een strijd van, alsof de software jou persoonlijk leed heeft berokkend. Het is gewoon software dat naar jouw tevredenheid werkt, of niet. Accepteer dat. Het is geen wedstrijd.
Ik zie persoonlijk geen directe meerwaarde voor deze nieuwe maskeroptie. Ik geef ideeën om er anders mee om te gaan. Dat is alles.
This comment was written in another language and has not been translated yet.

Donald Willemsen wrote on Monday 5 May 2025 at 14:23 | reply
Nando, als ik een uitgesproken mening heb, mag ik dat zeggen (schrijven). Jij mag dat ook. We leven in een (nog) vrij Europa waar vrijheid van meningsuiting (nu) nog altijd geldt als een groot goed.
Evenzo is het jouw goed recht om mijn woorden verkeerd te interpreteren.
Mijn woorden hebben niets maar dan ook niets met persoonlijk leed te maken. Laat dat vooral duidelijk zijn.
Mijn kritiek geldt niet op de software als zodanig, maar eerder op het beleid van Adobe als ontwikkelaar.
This comment was written in another language and has not been translated yet.

RAWshooter wrote on Tuesday 6 May 2025 at 11:15 | reply
Dit gaat niet om Adobe of zijn concurrentie, maar om de effecten van AI. Elke maker van editing software die AI inzet voor maskering gaat in de fout en zadelt zijn klanten op met een loze belofte. Nooit werkt het met de beloofde “one click”.
En dan kan ook niet, als je een beetje snapt wat AI in de fotografie inhoudt. Er wordt niets nieuws uitgevonden, er wordt louter gebruik gemaakt van al bestaande functies die geautomatiseerd worden. Ouwe wijn in beschimmelde zakken.
This comment was written in another language and has not been translated yet.

Ron wrote on Tuesday 6 May 2025 at 11:44 | reply
Donald werkt blijkbaar bij Adobe en heeft inside informatie tot zijn beschikking en weet hoe het bedrijf zijn invulling geeft aan de diverse software takken die het heeft. Een bedrijf wat zijn sporen reeds ruimschoots heeft verdiend in de wereld van foto en video bewerking terecht wijzen op wat het fout doet. Een bedrijf wat de toon aanvoert in de wereld van beeld film en geluid's software belerend toespreken dat het te laat is met de implementatie van diverse AI modulen.

Verder moet iedereen doen wat hij of zij prettig vindt. Ik zweer bij Adobe en adviseer: schoenmaker blijf bij je leest.
This comment was written in another language and has not been translated yet.

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A critical note on the new landscape masks in Lightroom

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