Today, we’re going to look at my favorite, and my go-to Range Mask feature - Luminance, which lets you mask parts of the image based on their brightness, so choose Luminance (as shown above). STEP TWO: Go to the bottom of the Graduated Filter panel, and you’ll see a Range Mask pop-up menu. Yes, I could carefully paint over my face and part of the dune to mask away those areas so they’re not dark, but Range Mask is faster, and in many cases does a much better. The darkening that added to the sky with the gradient, also darkened my face and part of the sand dunes as well. This is where problem comes in that the awesome Range Mask tool can fix. Here I clicked on the tool lowered the Exposure slider by more than 2-1/2 stops dragged the Temperature slider a little toward blue (to help the sky not be just a boring gray) and then I took the tool and dragged from the top of the image down to about my waist (as seen above). STEP ONE: my first thought would usually be to grab the Graduated Filter tool to darken the sky. Here’s our original image (photo of me in the desert outside Dubai by Brad Moore) and the sky is pretty washed out, so we’ll want to darken it a bit. That’s why today I’m doing to a quick introduction - kind of a beginner’s “get started with Range Mask” tutorial to…well…get you started. Awesome is right - the Range Mask feature is pretty darn awesome, but any time I show it, I get lots of comments from Lightroom users who didn’t realize it even existed.

Lightroom 4 graduated filter tutorial