When editing a photo, masking lets you select a person, an object or even a narrow range of hues, and adjust that instead of the entire image. Adobe Lightroom’s AI-powered masking is a revelation for anyone who’s spent hours selecting tricky areas such as hair or blades of grass.

Here are some of the ways Lightroom makes masking easier – and more powerful.

Masking a person in Lightroom is as simple as expanding the People section of the Masking panel and clicking on the person you want to edit. If it’s someone you’ve previously identified in the People panel, Lightroom will automatically label the mask.

After masking a person, narrowing your selection to particular features – for example, to adjust skin tone to better match real life – is just as easy: check the Facial Skin and Body Skin boxes and click Create to mask only exposed areas of skin. You can also confine your mask to Teeth, Eyebrows, Clothes and more.

Lightroom’s masks aren’t limited to people and objects: you can also mask individual pixels based on their hues – great for adding, say, a little saturation to a colour to make it pop.

In the Masking panel, click Range and choose Color Range. Then click the colour in your image you want to mask, using the Refine slider to include more or fewer nearby hues. Now use any of Lightroom’s editing tools to make adjustments to just those hues.

The same principle applies to Luminance Range masks, but instead of selecting colours, you’re choosing a range of brightness levels. (It’s great for enhancing the highlights of a waterfall.)

If person detection unexpectedly includes parts of other items, or if you’re finding it tedious to manually select complex sections of a landscape, the solution is to add, subtract or intersect multiple masks.

After creating an initial mask, remove any parts that shouldn’t be included by clicking Subtract (-), then use any of the masking tools – the AI-enhanced Object Brush or Color Range, for example – to select areas or colours. To add parts that were missed, click Add (+).

The Intersect mask has its own superpower: it creates a mask where two masks overlap. For example, you can use Color Range to mask instances of a particular colour, but specify that any adjustments affect only a specific area of the photo.

To create an Intersect mask, hold down the Option key and click the Add or Subtract Mask buttons; choose a mask type (such as Radial) and draw over the area in which you want your edits to appear.