Radial Masking In Lightroom Classic: How to Make Your Edits More Natural

A radial mask in Lightroom can fix the kind of “almost” photo that keeps bothering you, where the light is close but not landing where the eye should go. If you rely on Lightroom to shape mood, depth, and attention, this tool changes what you can do without making the edit look like an edit.

Coming to you from Mickey Pullen of Eastern Shore Photo Instruction, this hands-on video walks through radial masking as a repeatable workflow, not a random slider hunt. Pullen starts from a blank slate and shows how the Radial Gradient behaves when you draw it as a circle versus an ellipse, plus the simple modifier keys that keep you from fighting the shape. You get a clear look at how resizing works from the side handles, and how a single-side adjustment changes what the mask can cover. He also shows why feathering is where most people either nail the look or ruin it, since a hard edge reads fake fast. The early section is worth watching even if you think you already know radial, because it tightens the basic moves that keep your later edits controlled.

The more useful part is how Pullen applies radial masks to real frames and treats them like local lighting, not just “brighten the subject.” In one example, he builds a soft glow in the sky by pushing negative Dehaze inside a large, heavily feathered radial, then uses a subtraction mask to keep the spillover from taking over the water. That combination matters when you want atmosphere without turning the whole scene into haze soup. In another scene, he uses multiple radials as small dodges and burns to break up flat light, then refines where the change lands by intersecting with a Color Range so only certain tones respond. You see the tradeoff between speed and precision when you start stacking masks, and how quickly “a little” can become too much if you do not keep re-checking the image.

A key idea he keeps returning to is that radial masks do not have to sit neatly in the middle of anything. He shows how pushing the mask control point off the canvas can create a single, gradual shift across water, instead of a bright center that falls off on both sides. He also uses the Add behavior in masking to place multiple radials under one set of adjustment sliders, which is efficient but forces consistency because every added radial shares the same settings. Later, he demonstrates a custom vignette using a huge radial, an invert toggle, and careful shadow and highlight protection so the corners darken without crushing detail. If the built-in Lightroom vignette has ever felt like it is fighting your composition, this is the section that will make you rethink how you finish an edit. Check out the video above for the full rundown from Pullen.