Masks
All twelve mask kinds, and when to reach for each one.
Most real edits are local. A photo rarely needs to be brighter — it needs the face brighter, or the sky deeper, or the pavement less orange. A mask is how you say which part, and every adjustment in Matisse can be applied through one.
- Open Masking and add a mask.
- Pick the kind that matches what you are trying to select, from the twelve below.
- Adjust the mask until it covers what you meant.
- With the mask selected, change any Light, Colour, Effects or Detail setting. It now applies only there.
The twelve kinds
| Mask | Type | What it is for |
|---|---|---|
| Subject | Scene-aware | The main subject, found for you. The fastest way to separate a person or object from what is behind them. |
| Sky | Scene-aware | Just the sky. Deepen a blue, recover a blown white, or warm a sunset without touching the land. |
| Background | Scene-aware | Everything the subject is not. Darken or desaturate it to make the subject carry the frame. |
| Vegetation | Scene-aware | Foliage and greenery. Useful when landscape greens need their own hue and luminance treatment. |
| Architecture | Scene-aware | Buildings and built structures, separated from sky and street. |
| Artificial ground | Scene-aware | Roads, pavements and other man-made surfaces underfoot. |
| Brush | Drawn | Paint the area yourself. Total control, and the fallback whenever the automatic masks do not cut where you want. |
| Linear gradient | Drawn | A soft transition across a straight line, like a graduated filter. The classic way to hold back a bright sky. |
| Radial gradient | Drawn | A soft ellipse. Brighten a face, or vignette one part of the frame on your own terms. |
| Colour range | Range | Everything sharing a colour you pick. Change every red object at once, wherever it appears. |
| Luminance range | Range | Everything within a brightness band. Target only the highlights, or only the deep shadows. |
| Depth range | Range | Everything at a given distance, using the depth data captured with the photo. Separates near from far even when they are similar in colour. |
Choosing between them
The scene-aware masks are the quickest when they work, and they usually do on ordinary photographs. Where they struggle is fine edges — hair, foliage against a bright sky, a chain-link fence — because the boundary genuinely is ambiguous there.
The range masks are the ones people underuse. If what you want to select shares a colour, a brightness or a distance, a range mask will find it more precisely than you could paint it, and it will follow the subject across the whole frame.
The scene-aware masks are computed on your device. Nothing is uploaded to find a sky or a subject, which is why they keep working with no signal. See your photos and your data.
Masking is the difference between an edit that looks processed and one that looks like the light was simply better. If you take one habit from these docs, make it reaching for a mask before pushing a global slider any further.