Stop Painting Yourself Into a Corner: How the Range Mask Saves Your Local Adjustments

There is a particular kind of frustration that every retoucher knows. You paint a careful adjustment over a sky or a patch of bright water, and when you pull back to look at the full frame, you’ve accidentally dragged that adjustment onto areas you never wanted to touch. The dark foreground rocks go muddy. The shadows under a subject’s chin get crushed. You either spend twenty minutes cleaning up the edges with an eraser brush, or you accept an imprecise result and move on.