Intersect Masks: The Control You’re Missing in Lightroom

Masking in Lightroom can be the difference between an edit that looks clean and one that looks like you forced it. If you rely on quick global sliders, this is the kind of skill that quietly fixes the problems you keep seeing in skies, edges, and small details.

Coming to you from Mickey Pullen with Eastern Shore Photo Instruction, this practical video walks through the masking brush and the three modifiers that change how every mask behaves: add, subtract, and intersect. Pullen starts by tightening up the brush basics that most people skip once they learn the tool exists. You get a clear breakdown of what flow and density actually do in real edits, not in theory. The key distinction is how one controls how fast the effect builds, while the other caps how much effect can ever build, even if you keep brushing. If your dodging and burning keeps turning into obvious patches, this section will reset how you think about “light” in a local adjustment.

He also shows how brush softness changes your results, and he does it in a way that makes you notice your own habits. Feather at 0% versus 50% versus 100% is not a subtle difference once you see it placed on an image with exposure pushed hard. You also get a simple workflow trick: setting up two brush behaviors and flipping between them fast, so you stop wasting time dragging sliders back and forth. The moment you treat one brush as “soft build” and the other as “hard correction,” you start editing with intent instead of improvising every stroke. There is also a small but useful habit around erasing: using a modifier key to switch temporarily, so cleanup becomes part of the stroke instead of a separate step.

Where the video gets more interesting is when the brush stops being the main tool and becomes the cleanup tool. Pullen shows the brush doing what it does best: fixing masks that are almost right, especially along messy edges like tree branches against sky. Auto Mask comes up here, with the very specific idea that the center point is what matters, not the whole circle, so sloppy placement gives you strange spill. He demonstrates a “click, don’t drag” approach to patching missed areas, which is faster than painting when you only need to hit small gaps. Then he shifts to fine detail work where most people give up too early, including straight lines and curves, using a shift-click method that creates controlled segments and lets you walk a mask around a bend in small steps.

The add and subtract section is where you start seeing why people overuse the brush and still struggle. Yes, you can subtract with a brush, but you can also subtract with smarter selections when the scene allows it, like pulling vegetation out of a subject mask without tracing every leaf. That mindset carries into gradients too: you can brighten part of a scene with a linear gradient, then subtract another gradient to keep the light where it belongs, instead of “fixing” the spill with random brushing. There’s a strong practical thread running through all of this: stop stacking unrelated areas into one mask when they need different adjustments, because one slider will control everything tied to that mask whether it makes sense or not. If you have ever wondered why adjusting one part of an image unexpectedly changes another, you will recognize the mistake immediately.

Intersect is saved for last, and it’s the part you should not skip if you want more control without more complexity. The idea is simple: only the overlap counts, which turns broad masks into targeted ones without repainting. Pullen uses intersections with radial and linear gradients to shape light so it feels directional, not sprayed across the frame. You see it applied to landscapes and architecture in a way that hints at a repeatable method, especially when the “light source” needs to feel like it’s coming from a specific side. He also drops small keyboard and viewing habits that make this faster, including working zoomed in when precision matters and hiding pins when the overlays distract from judging the image. Check out the video above for the full rundown from Pullen.