Can't Subtract From Mask

Question

I susupect that I'm in the wrong and I'm asking Lightroom to do something it's not designed to do. Still, I'd sleep much better if someone authoritative tells me that's so and puts this nagging doubt to rest.

Look at the attached picture, please. Your eyes will instantly be drawn away from this fabulous picture to the weird hump on the woman's left side. (I think she's wearing her purse under her sweater.) I like this picture and I would love to lose that hump, leaving just a normal woman's silhouette. I started working with the heal tool but couldn't even get close.

Then I found out about the "subtract from mask" tool. (The Lightroom designers should be nominated for the programming Hall Of Fame, is there is such a thing.) Could this be the answer?

I created a mask of the subject. Then I clicked on "subtract" then "brush." I thought this would literally let me brush away the hump, leaving the background behind her. No go. Instead, I just got a normal developing brush that let me raise and lower exposure, contrast, etc. I couldn't subtract a piece of the subject mask.

That's not how it works, right? I'm asking it to do something it wasn't designed to do, right? And from the looks of this picture, what I'm trying can't be done. The hump is here to stay. I have a sinking feeling that I can't get there from here and that's there's no fix for this problem.

There was a previous post along the same lines. I tried doing everything that was suggested in that thread but didn't make any progress.

Two notes:

1) If any of you Lightroom pros want to show off a little, you'd have my undying gratitiude. I'd be happy to send you a high-res file to work with. Use subtract, heal, or any of those special tools that I've never heard of. I'm happy to pay standard retouching rates, whatever that is.

2) This picture was from 2013, meaning I was doing this kind of work while Thomas Struth was still suckling at his mother's teat. At worst, it's a Tesla/Marconi type of situation. I'm a fan of Struth. I'm just sayin'.

I'm running Lightroom 12.2 on a Mac using Ventura 13.6.6, the latest OS available for this 2017 nodel

Many thanks in advance.

Conrad_C · Answer

Unfortunately, mask subtraction is not quite what you want here. The feature does what it says — it subtracts from an existing adjustment mask (which is why you see those adjustment options). But that isn’t your goal, your goal is to subtract something from the subject content, not adjustments to that content such as Exposure.

In theory, what would work better is using one of the tools under the Heal category because they can change image content: The Content-Aware Remove, Heal, and Clone tools. But I played with the image a little, and none of those tools is a great solution here. The Content-Aware Remove tool is not as smart as the Remove tool in Photoshop (which got a lot farther more quickly). The Heal and Clone tools work by covering up the painted area with content from another part of the image, but the problem there is that there is no good content elsewhere in the image that you can select to help those tools quickly create a convincing left edge of the sweater. The closest source content would be the right edge of the sweater, but unlike Photoshop, the Clone tool in Lightroom Classic does not have a flip option, so that won’t work.

Maybe someone can come along with a way to get this done in Lightroom Classic alone; that would be great. But it looks to me like removing that hump is a job best done in Photoshop, to reconstruct that left edge so that it looks convincing both anatomically and how the clothing would drape around the anatomy (in other words, so that the retouch doesn’t look fake).

Edit: A few minutes after my original reply, in Photoshop I roughly selected the hump area, and applied Generative Fill (that AI feature people can’t stop talking about). I tried the useful technique of clicking Generate while leaving the prompt empty, which Generative Fill interprets as “do your best to fill the selection with plausible content.” Of the three variations it generated, the second one is much more convincing than anything I could do in Lightroom Classic. It’s still not a perfect fix, but it might be close enough to just need a little cleanup along the edge.

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