Lightroom's Quietly Dropped Two Masking Features That Change Everything About Local Adjustments

Lightroom's Quietly Dropped Two Masking Features That Change Everything About Local Adjustments

Color grading has always felt like one of those tools that’s 90% of the way there. The ability to push your highlights toward gold, nudge your shadows into teal, or breathe some cinematic warmth into your midtones is genuinely powerful. I use it on almost every landscape and portrait edit I touch. But for years, there’s been this maddening ceiling on what it can do: color grading applies globally, across the entire image, based on tonal values alone.