Sky Masking in Lightroom: The Fix for Halos and Gaps

Sky masks in Lightroom look effortless until you push exposure and discover halos, gaps in leaves, and messy edges around roofs and ridgelines. Get this wrong and the sky starts bleeding into everything that should stay crisp.

Coming to you from Mickey Pullen of Eastern Shore Photo Instruction, this practical video walks through sky masking the way you actually troubleshoot it when the automatic selection gets close but not clean. Pullen starts with a scene that has treetops cutting into blue sky, then shows a quick diagnostic move: drop exposure hard to reveal where the mask is failing. You see the usual problem areas immediately, especially the tiny unmasked “holes” near branches. Instead of fighting the Sky Mask selection first, Pullen flips the order and begins with a Color Range mask built from a dragged box, not a single click, so the selection is based on an average of the sky color. That small change sets up a more controlled mask before you ever touch the sky tool.

Once the Color Range mask is in place, the key move is intersection, not endless brushing. Pullen intersects the color selection with a brush so the effect only lands where you paint, which lets you target the trouble spots near foliage without dragging sky adjustments into the foreground. After that, adding the Sky Mask on top becomes a cleanup step instead of a rescue mission. The result is a tighter edge with less spill, and it’s repeatable across different skies, not just one lucky frame. Pullen also shows a habit worth stealing: duplicate and invert the finished sky mask before making big adjustments, so a usable foreground mask is sitting there if you decide the land needs separate tuning. That workflow saves time when the edit starts to branch into “sky version A” and “foreground version B,” which happens fast when the light is uneven.

The second example switches from trees to architecture, which is where many sky masks fall apart in a different way: you get a faint glow along hard edges that makes buildings look cut out. Pullen evaluates the mask with a black-and-white overlay view so you can see what’s truly selected, then uses subtraction masks tied to scene elements like architecture, vegetation, and mountains. It’s a smarter first pass than trying to erase every mistake by hand, and it gets you most of the way there in seconds. After that, Pullen does a controlled manual cleanup by temporarily pulling exposure down again and painting carefully with a low-flow brush to remove the glow without carving jagged edges. The settings matter here, but the bigger point is the order of operations: diagnose, subtract broadly, then refine locally.

The third scene is the one that will probably make you pause the video and replay, because it deals with overcast skies and weird color casts where “making it bluer” is the wrong instinct. Pullen uses the same Color Range plus intersect approach, but this time samples whites and grays to catch cloud layers, then corrects cyan and blue by working with Point Color controls. Instead of forcing a uniform look everywhere, Pullen isolates a small patch that’s drifting too blue and fixes only that area, then adds subtle contrast by brushing light into select highlights at low flow. You also see a practical approach to uneven skies: a linear mask can shape tone from top to bottom without flattening the whole image, especially when the sky needs structure but not drama. Check out the video above for the full rundown from Pullen.