Problems with auto mask.

[hikerguy62]

I've got about 100 photos of items I'm wanting to sell on eBay. They looked fine on my phone, but now that I'm viewing them on my PC, the background looks grey.

I came across Lightroom and the auto mask feature and got it to work one time today. Now I'm going back and trying to whiten the background of another image and I cannot get it to work. Earlier when I used that tool, it would whiten the background in realtime. Another time I would turned the masked area a bright pink/red. Now all I see when I start using that tool is a very light pink.

I have auto mask checked and set Whites to 100%.  I even tried closing and restarting Lightroom Classic with no change. Can someone tell me what I'm doing wrong this second time around????  Attached is a pic to show you how grey the background turned out. I want to turn it white.

Thanks,

Andy

{Moved from Lightroom Cloud to Lightroom Classic Forum by Moderator}

[johnrellis]

"Another time I would turned the masked area a bright pink/red. Now all I see when I start using that tool is a very light pink."

The masked area shows as pink when you've checked Show Selected Mask Overlay below the image. If you don't see that checkbox, make sure the toolbar is showing by doing the menu command View > Show Toolbar. (You can learn the keyboard shortcuts for this by looking at the menu.)

See this screen recording:  https://www.dropbox.com/s/c11052g9bl1uedj/automask-white.2010.07.14.mov?dl=0

Setting Exposure = 4 will completely whiten the background, whereas setting Whites = 100 will leave a little bit of faint detail (which you may prefer).

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[GoldingD]

You might have better results by intentanaly not using auto-mask. Instead just make one big adjustment brush selection, perhaps the whole image in your example, then turn on Rang Mask, select color, select the eyedropper, click and drag some of the background, adjust.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SFuHYJvBXIQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TwkF90HCGf4

https://lightroomkillertips.com/exploring-range-mask-options-color/