I was doing the processing for a business portrait shoot that I did last night when it dawned on me that there's an outstanding benefit to having the Localized Color Brush in combination with the Auto Mask option in Lightroom 2.0: It's very easy to make a white background any color you like. 'The beautify of this is that it really works well when you have a lot of stray flying hair in the image. Can you believe that the image below started out with a white background. Look at how perfectly the background color "fills in" the tiny spaces between the flying hairs...and her hair isn't colored at all. Best of all, this only takes a couple of minutes!

In addition to making it really easy to change the color of the background, there's another great advantage to shooting this on a white background: You can white balance the entire shoot by selecting every shot in the Filmstrip, grabbing the White Balance dropper from the Basic Panel in the Develop Module, and then clicking on the Sync button. When the Sychronize Settings dialog appears, click Check None and then click the White Balance check box. Click Synchronize and the white balance is set for the whole sitting.

When it comes to changing the background color, that has to be done one image at a time. What seems to work best is a fairly large brush with very little feathering because the feathering seems to smear the color beyond the Auto Mask. Did I say Auto Mask? The whole secret is in turning on it's check box. The Auto Mask selects a range of colors with the color that you start brushing on (the X in the center of the circle) as the core color. I also lower the Flow slider, since it seems to give more leeway to the color range within the auto mask and I don't want to mask anything but the background color; certainly not the hair, skin or dress. A white background works especially well, but so would any color that is relatively even and contrasts strongly with the subject. However, bright colors in a background will often reflect onto the edges of the subject, so there may be a greater chance that you'll re-color portions of the image that you didn't want to re-color.