Adobe has added several new features to the latest release of Lightroom Classic, version 15.5. One of the smaller additions is the introduction of edge refinement controls for masks.
At first glance, this might not sound like a particularly exciting update, but I think these new controls could prove to be extremely useful. In particular, they should help with one of the problems that can occur when using Lightroom’s masking tools: unwanted halos around the edges of your selections.
Previously, if I encountered particularly stubborn halos, I would often end up taking the image into Photoshop to try to clean them up. The new edge refinement controls give us much more control directly within Lightroom Classic.
When working with a mask in Lightroom Classic, you’ll now find two controls that can help refine its edges:
The edge slider is particularly useful when you have fine detail sitting against a contrasting background.
Let’s look at a few examples.
I’ve covered Lightroom’s AI masking capabilities before, so I won’t go into too much detail here. Lightroom can analyse your image and identify different elements such as the the main subject, people, sky, mountains, vegetation, water and natural ground.
The resulting masks are generally quite good, and with a normal edit there aren’t any obvious problems. However, in certain situations, we can see an unwanted halos appearing around the edges of masked areas.
This is exactly the sort of problem that the new edge refinement controls are designed to address.
The new edge controls tend to be most useful when you’re dealing with relatively fine, dark detail against a brighter background.
The Feather slider works great for softening a mask. It gradually fades the edge of the mask from a solid selection into fully opaque.
The new Edge slider works differently.
Moving the slider to the left expands the mask without any softening, while moving it to the right pulls the edge of the mask inwards. A surprising amount of the fine detail can be recovered simply by adjusting the edge of the mask.
Tree branches shot against a bright sky are another example of where I think this feature can be particularly useful.
Quite often the fine detail of all the individual branches and leaves can make it difficult for AI masks to find all the edges accurately. So again, when changing settings for the mask area, we end up with none edited areas where the mask hasn’t been able to properly find it’s way between the tree elements.
Once again, adjusting the Edge and Feather sliders can often eliminate this problem almost entirely.
The new edge refinement controls might seem like a relatively minor addition to Lightroom Classic, but I think they’re going to be surprisingly useful.
AI masking has become incredibly powerful, but there are still situations where Lightroom struggles with fine detail, particularly where dark objects meet a bright background. Trees against a sky, feathers, hair and other intricate edges can all produce unwanted halos when adjustments are applied.
Previously, fixing those problems could mean creating more complicated masks, making compromises with your adjustments, or even moving the image into Photoshop.
The new Edge slider gives us another tool to deal with those problems directly within Lightroom Classic.
It’s not going to fix every masking problem automatically, and you may sometimes need to combine it with feathering or additional subtractive masks. But it’s another useful level of control, and one that I can see myself using regularly.
Check out the video where I show examples of the edge refinement tools in Lightroom.
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