Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Classic’s Select Subject command is part of a fantastic update to our image editing capabilities. The Select Subject command, which uses an AI-based algorithm to detect the subject in your image, is part of a new feature called Masking.
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Masking means targeting color or brightness changes to one specific part of your image without accidentally changing anything else. The Select Subject command can identify and select the subject of your photograph using a Mask. This AI technology has been trained to look for people, animals, and many types of inanimate objects.
The mask that the Select Subject command generates is a bit-map type mask. Bit-map masks use the colors white and black to represent the areas where changes to your image will or will not occur. These are the same kind of masks that many of us are used to using when we work with Layer Masks inside of Adobe Photoshop.
With so many options for adding masks, Adobe also wanted to streamline our workflow by letting us name our masks and create mask groups. With mask groups, you can combine a tool like Select Subject with any other tool like the gradient filter. You can also invert a mask, which can be very handy at times.
Masking and the Select Subject command are some of the biggest improvements that we have seen inside of Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Classic in over a decade. These new features, which are part of the October 2021 upgrade, allow us to take our image editing capabilities to a whole new level.
