It seems like every portrait session I shoot there’s a request for at least one hand colored look image. Until now, that meant a trip to Photoshop, even if that was the only adjustment to be made. With the addition of the Masking brush in Lightroom 2.0 beta, I can now do much of this right in Lightroom.
It’s a different approach than Photoshop though, and it’s one that had me wondering about the usefulness for this type of editing. In Photoshop, I’d typically add a grayscale layer to the image and then mask out the area I wanted to see in color. With Lightroom, I have to work in the opposite direction - I desaturate everything except the area I want in color.
To start out, I’ve selected the Mask brush, and set the Paint effect to Saturation. To get grayscale, I adjust the Effect to -100.
I

I’ll normally start with a large brush size to clear the bulk of the image up. The Auto Mask option helps here, and does a good job of protecting edges from adjustment, and when you’re dealing with something like the bouquet in this image, that’s a welcome helping hand.
After the initial pass, I’ll go back in with smaller brush sizes to clean up areas. In the example shown here, I needed to fix the bride’s chin where some color had been left, and the groom’s flowers where I desaturated them. You can see the multiple pins showing where each mask is

Of course, if you make a mistake, you can always delete that mask, which has the added benefit of watching the nifty little cloud animation (hey, I’m easily amused, what can I say?).
The new tools in the Lightroom 2.0 beta look very promising, and I’m finding new ways to avoid that trip into Photoshop, and speed up my image processing time. I’d love to hear how you’re making use of the new features.

Here are the before and after versions of the image: