How Masking in Lightroom Finally Let Me Stop Editing the Whole Damn Frame

Every composite I build starts with a problem of light. Not the dramatic, poetic kind of problem — the practical, frustrating kind. I’ve got a subject shot in flat afternoon light that I need to drop into a scene with hard directional shadows. Before I ever open Photoshop, I’m in Lightroom trying to wrestle the raw file into something workable. And the core issue is always the same: I don’t want to adjust the whole image.