New in Lightroom and Adobe Camera RAW: Easily select people

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New in Lightroom and Adobe Camera RAW: Easily select people

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October 27, 2022

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Adobe has made it easy to select people in Lightroom and Adobe Camera RAW. The Masking Panel helps you achieve precise editing, quickly adjusting skin, teeth, eyes and more.

This is from a gala fundraiser for Exceptional Children’s Foundation at the Skirball Museum in Los Angeles.

How does it do this?

Adobe Camera RAW 15 and Lightroom 12 automatically detect all the people in the photo using AI masking. From there, you simply select the person in the image.

How easy is it really?

Really easy. The example I show uses Adobe Camera RAW while in Photoshop. However, it looks and works in the same way in Lightroom.

In Adobe Camera RAW, I clicked on the Masking Icon, circled in red. From here, I can easily create masks for Subject, Sky, Background, Objects, or People, among other ways.

Open the photo you want to edit in Photoshop. From the top menu, go to Filter > Camera RAW Filter. Click on the Masking Icon. I’ve circled this in red.

After Adobe detects people, you can select an individual person by clicking on each circle. I’ve selected “Person 1” here, who was the former President and CEO of Exceptional Children’s Foundation. You can see how he is now painted in red by Camera RAW.

You will see several masks. Underneath the People Mask section, you will see some activity. Adobe will take a few seconds to detect people. After that, you can see round circles with the people’s faces. This is how you will select each person.

Adobe’s People Selection function is quite accurate in general. It makes mistakes occasionally, such as selecting two people as one person. I am sure of this because I spoke to both of these gentlemen and know that they are not two-headed people.

You can then create specific masks that will be your adjustment areas. You can create masks for the whole person, skin, teeth, eyes and more.

These are close-ups of three panels next to each other as I went through them in succession. For Panel 1, the entire person is selected. In Panel 2, I selected his teeth and then pressed the blue “Create” button. In Panel 3, I can make all sorts of adjustments to his teeth.

After that, you can begin adjusting the sliders to that selection.

And remember, this works precisely the same way in Lightroom.

Automatically select people, objects and background

I’ve just scratched the surface here. As you can see, there are masks for not only people, but subjects, objects, sky and background. In either Lightroom or Adobe Camera RAW, Adobe makes it easy to make these selections. This is an outstanding and welcome feature. Adobe seems to have doubled down on creating quick and useful selections, historically one of the more tedious tasks to perform when editing images.

About Exceptional Children’s Foundation

I photographed this gala fundraiser for Exceptional Children’s Foundation. They have been providing the highest quality services for children and adults who are challenged with developmental, learning and emotional barriers since 1946. Find out more about ECF here.