AI Masking

How to Fake Wet Streets, Stack Weather Overlays, and Actually Understand Blend Modes in ON1 Photo RAW
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How to Fake Wet Streets, Stack Weather Overlays, and Actually Understand Blend Modes in ON1 Photo RAW

Last month I was retouching a series of architectural shots for a hospitality client. Beautiful cobblestone courtyard, golden-hour light, the whole thing. Problem was, the stones looked completely flat and dusty on camera. The client’s reference images all had that slick, rain-kissed texture that makes stone surfaces look rich and dimensional. I ended up doing a passable job with a luminosity mask and some manual dodging, but it took longer than it should have, and I knew there was a cleaner path.

Build Once, Retouch Forever: Creating an AI-Powered Adaptive Portrait Preset in Lightroom
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Build Once, Retouch Forever: Creating an AI-Powered Adaptive Portrait Preset in Lightroom

If there is one thing fifteen years in commercial photography has taught me, it is that the tasks you repeat most often are the ones worth eliminating first. Portrait retouching is my clearest example. Every shoot comes with the same list: smooth the skin a touch, pop the eyes slightly, add a little life to the lips, deepen the hair. The adjustments are almost always the same. The execution, until recently, was manual every single time.

Lightroom's AI Masks Just Made Presets Actually Worth Using
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Lightroom's AI Masks Just Made Presets Actually Worth Using

I’ve been skeptical of presets for most of my career. Not because they don’t work, but because they work until they don’t. You build a beautiful sky treatment, save it as a preset, apply it to the next landscape, and then spend five minutes dragging gradients around to make it fit a completely different horizon line. At that point you’ve burned half the time you were trying to save. For high-volume work, that friction adds up fast.

AI Presets in Lightroom: What They Actually Do and When to Use Them
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AI Presets in Lightroom: What They Actually Do and When to Use Them

I track the hours my batch systems save me. Obsessively, actually — I’ve got a spreadsheet that currently sits at over 2,400 hours recovered from repetitive post-processing tasks. So when a tool promises to make presets smarter and faster, I pay attention. Not out of optimism, but because I’ve been burned before by “intelligent” features that just added extra steps in disguise. AI presets in Lightroom are different, and it took watching William Patino work through his own philosophy on them for me to fully articulate why.