In this short Lightroom tutorial, Joe Houghton answers a viewer’s email about problems with radial and linear masks. He demonstrates how to create a radial gradient mask (Shift+M), explains the overlay colors and the inner/outer lines that appear, shows how to toggle those lines on and off with the H key, and how to adjust feathering both by dragging the inner line and using the feather slider. He then addresses the issue of the mask appearing “back‑to‑front” and shows how to invert the mask direction with the invert checkbox or the apostrophe (') shortcut. The video provides clear, step‑by‑step instructions to resolve the viewer’s masking issues.
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Hi, this is Joe Houghton, and in this little Lightroom Bite, I want to cover a question that came in from Barbara who was having some problems with her masking. Here's the email she sent. So Barbara has 2 issues with her radial mask. So let's, let's just fire up a radial mask on this squirrel. So we go to New Masks, Radial Gradient, and the shortcut key to do this is Shift+M. So you could just press Shift+M and that gives you your crosshairs. So let's just say that we wanted a radial gradient over the whole of the Squirrel, something like that. Now, this is what you would probably normally see. You see the outer line and the inner line, and then you see a coloured area within the radial gradient, which is the colour that you last chose for your overlay. So I have mine with this colour here, but I think the default is red, something like that. But you can also choose these other colours. Okay, I just see this colour quite well against the the, you know, the woodland colours. So something like that. Now, if we go back to Barbara's email, she says that the Radial Filter and Linear Filters only come in colour and not lines. So the way that you can toggle the lines on and off on any of the filters is the H key. So press the H key, the lines go away. You've still got the colour, But you haven't got the lines. So pressing H toggles the lines on and off. And if you want to change the feather here, you can drag that inner line out and in. So it makes it nice and easy to, to do that. You can also change the feather up here with the slider just there. Okay, so that's showing the colour. all the lines with the H key. Okay. And the other thing is that Barbara was saying they seem to be back to front. So in this case, we've got the gradient of the radial filter going from full saturation in the middle to no saturation or no application of the mask at the outside. And if you want to flip that the other way around, there's a little invert box at the top right, just here, and that flips it the other way. So that's now everything outside of the Radial Filter masked with the Radial Filter feathering coming in from the outside. And the shortcut key to do an invert is the apostrophe key. So you press the apostrophe key and that inverts as well. So I think, Barbara, that should sort your problems out. So H to turn the lines on and off, and the apostrophe key to invert the mask. Thanks for watching. See you next time.
