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PECourtejoie
Community Expert
Community Expert
September 28, 2022
Open for Voting

Get masks/Selections from Camera Raw

  • September 28, 2022
  • 27 replies
  • 5337 views

The masking tools in Camera Raw are easy, efficient, and powerful, especially with the Alt Intersect shortcut.

It might be very useful, if we could export them to be re-used in Photoshop, even if we lose their dynamicness.

27 replies

Rob_Cullen
Community Expert
Community Expert
June 26, 2026

(Not ACR but-)There is a plugin for Lightroom-Classic that can extract masks. I have not used. There is a 30day trial available.

https://johnrellis.com/lightroom/copysettings.htm

 

Regards. My System: Windows-11, Lightroom-Classic 15.4.1, Photoshop 27.8, ACR 18.4, Lightroom 9.4, Lr-iOS 10.4.0, Bridge 16.0.3 .
Trevor.Dennis
Community Expert
Community Expert
June 25, 2026

Pierre, I am so going to make full use of the word ‘dynamicness’ going forward.  

 

Kamil Kurzajewski
Participant
June 25, 2026

3 years and nothing?

Trevor.Dennis
Community Expert
Community Expert
June 25, 2026

Where have you been hiding Kamil?  Masking in Camera RAW and Lightroom is orders of magnitude better than it was when Pierre started this thread. In fact, Matt Klosowski put up a video about one of the new features just four hours ago, but we can automatically mask sky people….

 

Kamil Kurzajewski
Participant
June 25, 2026

????!

reusing them in ps is possibile i assume… 🤡

michaeljames005
Participant
June 16, 2026

Agreed. Camera Raw's masking workflow has become so good that it's often faster than building equivalent selections in Photoshop from scratch.

Even if the masks were exported as static pixel masks or channels, that would still save a lot of time. The intelligence has already been applied at that point—the main value is being able to continue refining and compositing in Photoshop without recreating the selection.

It feels like a natural bridge between the two applications and would make Camera Raw masks much more useful in complex Photoshop workflows.

Kalajda
Known Participant
February 18, 2025

Done 🙂

Kalajda
Known Participant
February 18, 2025

Hi, I have an idea followed by a question. When I create automatic masks - (people recognition - skin, mouth, eye, clothes, etc.) at ACR in RAW file, is it possible to open them (import) into Photoshop together with a picture? It would be nice to keep them. I know that I can keep them while importing a smart object into Photoshop for later edits. I feel I can edit and combine them more easily directly in Photoshop.

PECourtejoie
Community Expert
Community Expert
February 18, 2025

Merging with an existing request.

@Kalajda please vote on top of this thread.

ArrSea
Participant
November 29, 2024

I tracked down the "Ideas" section (never used it before) to submit this very request. I see this has been here for a while, but I will upvote to keep this rolling. I watched a seminar where the instructor demonstrated how to get a better mask by using the ACR filter, but then I wondered how to get that mask/selection back into Photoshop... except you can't. Yes, I tracked down a couple of examples where you can drastically alter the colour/contrast/exposure of your selection in ACR, then use that to re-select in Photoshop. Not always effective.

So, yes, being able to transfer a mask/selection from the ACR filter back into Photoshop would be super.

Or... just add the same masking tools directly into Photoshop. Surely the underlying code is there, it just needs to be incorporated.

Participant
October 23, 2024

Hi there, it's been long time that i think about an improvement to import masks created/generated in LR and CR as mask/layer mask also in PS.  They could be very useful for post-processing workflow.

 

What do you think about that ?

Cheers!

Ivan Zajats
Inspiring
June 8, 2024

up!

Participant
May 2, 2024

I completely agree we need this ability to export selections from ACR (or Lightroom) to Photoshop.