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Alanbphotography
Participant
April 30, 2026
Open for Voting

P: (Masking) fill the center of an outline selection

  • April 30, 2026
  • 1 reply
  • 27 views

Hello,
 
I often use masking to brighten up a place in the photo, especially for portrait pictures. I always start by selecting the outline of the place I want, except that unfortunately Lightroom Classic doesn’t offer (or maybe a secret function?) to be able to fill the inside of the selection. Because it would save valuable minutes on retouching since I’m not a fan of the automatic skin detection tool. (I often have strange effects on the contours of faces, arms, hands when the background is not the same color. Which is understandable when the colors are a bit similar).

 

I can take about 15 minutes or more for some masks to fill the inside. And even by removing the gradual outline of the brush, to fill the inside and go faster, I often end up with small unpainted spots (setting the exposure to +2.00 to check the entire mask).

 

This option would allow me and could allow us Lightroom users a huge saving of editing time in photography. And as a professional photographer, this time saving is considerable when there are many photos to edit.

 

Thanks in advance,

      1 reply

      R
      Community Expert
      richardplondonCommunity Expert
      Community Expert
      April 30, 2026

      There are some ways you can speed up painting a brushed selection.

       

      One method I recommend depends on a difference of behaviour between ‘dragging’ the brush across the image with the mouse button held down, and clicking the brush when it is stationary on the image (perhaps call that ‘dabbing’). For dragging, the Automask option can give rather crude results. But if you set a large brush radius and ‘dab’, a quite nice progressive selection can be built up which refers to similarity with whatever colour (combination of tone and hue) sits under the crosshair in the middle of the brush at the time that you click. So a sequence of such ‘dabs’ can rapidly paint a good mask with active help from the picture content. The same method can then subtract any areas of the mask you don’t want, with Option / Alt key, referring to colour similarities found in those ‘outside’.

       

      Another is of course to combine selection types within the same overall mask. You can place an elliptical gradient and then combine this with additive or subtractive brushing. You can intersect a tonal or hue range. Lots of timesavers there, if you are prepared to consider more widely than brushing alone.

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