Well, it turns out this same workaround works in Adobe Camera Raw too.

Pretty cool! What if I don’t use Lightroom cloud? Once the sync was up to date, I opened the photo back in Develop and both masks were ready for me to make desired adjustments independently. Now I had a mask for the sky and for the reflection! I named them both (double-click the mask to rename), and switched back to Lightroom Classic. Then I went back to the Crop tool and flipped it back upright, hopped back to the Masking tools and choose Create New Mask, and Select Sky, and it selected the actual sky. Then, clicking the Masking icon to exit the Crop tool I choose Select Sky on the flipped photo, and … well what do you know? It worked!

Then, I thought, I wonder if Lightroom (cloud) could be tricked into selecting the reflection in a flipped photo, so since my collection was synced to the cloud, I switched to the desktop version of Lightroom, opened the photo in the Crop tool and flipped it vertically there. I thought, what if I flip the photo vertically so that the reflection was on the top of the photo and the sky was on the bottom, then click Select Sky? I tried that, but the AI was too smart and still selected the actual sky at the bottom of the photo.

I can click Select Sky, and that works great for the actual sky, as it should.īut wouldn’t it be cool if it could also detect the reflection of the sky in the water below and select that in some automated way? I may not want to apply the same exact settings to the reflection as the sky itself, but a way to automatically select it could be helpful (sure, you can always brush over it and fiddle). However, there are some photos where the sky is also reflected in a body of water and it would be really helpful if that could be automatically selected too. The new AI based tools for selecting subject and sky are fantastic and work really well for their stated purpose. That said, here’s the problem and a proposed solution (aka kludge). Perhaps someone will figure out a more elegant solution (like Adobe), and I’d love to hear it. Ok, I’ll admit right away that this is not pretty, but I thought it was interesting enough to share.

Lightroom hack version 2020