Masks & Local Adjustments

Most edits change the whole frame at once. Masks let you change part of it — brighten just your subject, pull back just the sky, warm just the foreground. This is the step that separates a corrected photo from a deliberate one: by lighting some areas and quieting others, you guide the viewer's eye exactly where the story is.

Open a photo, open Adjustments, and tap + in the Masks row. Every mask carries its own adjustments, so you can stack several, each doing one job, and see each one as a preview thumbnail in the mask list. Masks are a Darkroom+ feature. Foreground and background on a Portrait photo stay free.

You can select from the following types of masks:

• Magic Select — tap, draw, or box select any object in the photo.
• Gradient Masks — place a Linear or Radial gradient yourself.
• Subject and Depth Masks — isolate the main Subject, split the scene into Foreground and Background, or target a slice of Depth Range.
• Range Masks — select by Color Range or Luminance Range.
• Smart Masks — Sky, Skin, Hair, Glasses, and Teeth, recorded by the Apple Camera app on Portrait and ProRAW photos.

Refine the edge of Magic Select, Subject, Foreground, Background, and Smart Masks with the edge tools. Range masks use Falloff.

Magic Select

Magic Select lets you choose what goes in the mask: a person, the bike they're riding, the bag they're carrying. Instead of painting along an edge by hand, a tap or a quick stroke selects the whole object. It runs on Apple's segmentation model on your device, and the photo stays there.

• Tap an object to select it. This works best when the object stands out in the frame.
• Draw across a region when a tap is ambiguous, so the selection can span several areas.
• Long-press and drag to box select a larger area without brushing back and forth.

Every selection adds to the mask, so you can tap a person, then their bike. If you pick up too much, switch to the eraser and select the part to remove. Undo and redo are right in the tool. Magic Select needs iOS 27 and a supported device.

Edge tools

Magic Select, Subject, Foreground, Background, and Smart Masks follow the shapes in your photo, so their edges can sometimes use a touch-up: a faint halo after a large exposure change, or a blocky edge around hair. Open the mask's ••• menu and choose Show Edge Tools.

• Edge Fit — pulls the mask edge onto the real edges near it. Most useful for hair, fur, and leaves. Only the area near the edge changes.
• Shift Edge — moves the whole edge in or out. Drag left when a thin outline of the background shows, or right when the mask cuts off part of your subject.
• Feather — softens the edge so the adjustment fades in instead of stopping at a hard line. A little is usually enough to hide a seam.

Gradient Masks

Place a gradient yourself when the area has no clear edge to select: a sky, a horizon, or light falling off across a scene.

• Linear — skies, horizons, and foreground falloff.
• Radial — a subject or a vignette, with adjustable feathering. Invert it to edit everything outside the oval.

You can zoom out past "fit to view" to place a Linear or Radial mask from outside the frame, so the gradient starts well beyond the edge of the photo.

Subject and Depth Masks

When you open a photo, Darkroom builds an understanding of the scene on your device. The photo stays there, and it is fast enough to fit your normal workflow. That gives you masks that used to take a careful selection by hand:

• Subject — the main subject, so you can raise Exposure on a face or lift the person off what is behind them. Skin smoothing belongs on a Skin mask, under Smart Masks. Portrait editing is a mask-driven walkthrough.
• Foreground and Background — the scene split front to back, so a person and their surroundings can be graded separately.
• Depth Range — a slice of distance. Invert it to edit everything except that slice.

Depth Range, Foreground, and Background are built using Depth Anything, a model Apple provides pre-bundled in iOS. It runs privately and locally on your device, and the photo stays there. The depth estimation holds the detail that is hardest to select by hand: busy backgrounds, hair, foliage, and a subject that doesn't separate cleanly from what's behind it.

Range Masks

Select by color or brightness instead of by position.

• Color Range — selects by hue. Widen it to pull in neighboring colors.
• Luminance Range — selects by brightness, so the edit hits only the bright pixels or only the dark ones.

A range can also sit inside another mask. Masks inside masks covers which combinations work.

Falloff

How a selection fades at its edges decides whether an adjustment looks deliberate or obviously masked. Color Range, Luminance Range, and Depth Range let you set falloff on the lower end and the higher end of the range independently.

That independence is the useful part. You can hold a hard edge at one end of the range while letting the other end drift out gradually — protect deep shadows with a sharp lower boundary, say, while a soft upper falloff lets a highlight adjustment blend into the midtones with no visible seam. In practice it means you can isolate a tonal band without creating a hard transition, push a single color while leaving neighboring hues untouched, or refine a depth selection so it fades naturally into the distance rather than stopping at an invisible wall.

Smart Masks

The Apple Camera app records these masks at capture time, and Darkroom shows them when a photo has them.

• Portrait photos — Skin, Hair, Glasses, and Teeth.
• ProRAW photos — Sky, Skin, and Subject.

Drop Clarity inside a Skin mask to smooth complexion while eyes and hair stay crisp, or brighten Teeth a touch.

Masks inside masks

A range can sit inside another mask, so the edit hits only where the two overlap.

A Luminance Range inside a Linear mask darkens the bright sky and leaves the land below the horizon alone.

A Color Range inside a Subject mask shifts a shirt, or a patch of skin, and leaves the rest of the person alone. A Luminance Range inside a Depth Range lifts only the dark part of that slice of distance. Depth can sit inside a Subject mask the same way, so you edit one distance within the person rather than the whole silhouette.

Linear and Radial do not merge into one selection. Add, subtract, and intersect are not available on the shapes themselves — combining two soft shapes that way was harder to keep track of than it was useful. You can still get that result by letting them overlap. Each gradient keeps its own adjustments, and nothing is baked in, so where a Linear mask and a Radial mask cross, both edits apply. Darken the sky with one and lift a face with the other: the shared pixels receive both, and either mask can still be changed.

Working with masks

Each mask's actions live behind the ••• button: add, invert, delete, or reset just that mask's edits. Duplicating comes in two flavours, and the distinction saves real time — duplicate and invert gives you a complementary pair, which is the fast way to grade a foreground and background against each other, while duplicate without inverting gives you a straight copy to adjust from, useful when you want two similar selections that differ only slightly.

You can also stack multiple masks of the same type on one photo, each independently invertible — two radial masks lifting two faces in a group shot, or a pair of luminance ranges doing different jobs at different ends of the histogram. Every mask carries its own full set of adjustments, so detail can be pushed in one region and left alone everywhere else.

The workflow that holds up best is to correct the whole image globally first, then add your most impactful mask, then smaller supporting ones — keeping each adjustment subtle, since local edits stack into something artificial fast. If a masked look travels badly to another photo, use selective paste in History to copy your edits without the masks.

Frequently Asked Questions

Related

• Portrait editing — for a mask-driven portrait workflow
• Make Local Adjustments with Masks — the full feature tour
• Magic Select Masks in Darkroom — how Magic Select and the edge tools came together
• Adjustment Sliders — the edits you apply inside each mask