Masking is the process of isolating a subject in the frame so you can modify it separately from the rest of the image. In the Premiere 26 release of Premiere, Adobe significantly changed how masking works.
What’s new is the Object Mask whose KEY benefit is to use AI to create mask shapes. Premiere no longer limits us to geometric shapes. While those older features such as elliptical, rectangular and custom pen mask shapes still exist, they’ve moved.
Now, all those individual mask settings are now gathered into the new Object mask tool.
Here’s how these work.
This is our star: Elle, the Asian elephant. (I recorded this last year at the Patera Elephant Farm and Clinic in northern Thailand.)
In this tutorial, I want to create two different effects:
I should point out that you don’t need to use elephants to achieve these results. Any foreground object would work – even a person!
EXERCISE 1: BLUR THE BACKGROUND
In the past, each effect in Effect Controls had series of masking controls.
Those were moved into a new tool in the toolbar: Object Mask. Inside are four controls:
These last three will be familiar to anyone that’s used masking in Premiere in the past. The Object mask, though, is new.
Here’s how to mask a portion of a clip.
Apply the effect you want to use to a timeline clip before adding the mask. In the screen shot above, I added a Gaussian Blur to blur the entire image.
Select the clip in the timeline, then select the name of the effect in Effect Controls.
Select the Object mask from the toolbar, then drag it over the object you want to isolate in the Program Monitor. (The subject will turn red.)
NOTE: If you don’t see the dotted line around the object, click the object in the Program Monitor until it appears.
In Effect Controls, you’ll see that the mask has been created and located inside the effect – Gaussian Blur in my example – with tracking controls similar to earlier versions of Premiere.
NOTE: The edges of the mask are blurry because the blur still applies to the entire clip.
NOTE: If, instead you see an Unassigned Mask at the top of Effect Controls, don’t panic. Simply drag the name of the mask on top of the name of the effect to which you want to apply the mask.
Click the double-headed Tracker arrow (red arrow) in the mask to track the movement of the selected object for the duration of the clip.
NOTE: The time it takes to track an image depends upon the duration of the clip, the complexity of the selected object and the speed of your system. With my M2 Mac Studio, tracking was essentially realtime.
When the tracking is complete, click Inverted if you want the mask to apply to the background (checked) or foreground (unchecked). Because we want to blur the background, check Inverted.
To see the finished effect, select anything except the name of the mask. Then, adjust your effect until you are happy. You can use this technique to adjust the color or luminance of the selected area, or blur a face, or… well, the options are almost limitless.
IMPORTANT NOTE: You can only apply one mask to one effect. If you want to apply multiple effects to the same clip, you need to use the next technique.
EXERCISE 2: CHANGE BOTH FOREGROUND AND BACKGROUND
While the first exercise was easy, however the limitation of not being able to group multiple effects into one mask is quite limiting. So, here’s what you need to know.
In this example, I want to change the color of the elephant AND darken and blur the background.
To do this, we need to duplicate the clip: one for foreground and the other for background.
In the timeline, select the top clip (this is the foreground). Select Opacity in Effect Controls so that we create a clip containing just the foreground.
Choose the Object Mask tool in the Toolbar and select the foreground object you want to modify in the Program Monitor
Track the mask as we did before by clicking the double-arrows next to the mask name.
NOTE: If you apply the Object Mask to an effect, while the foreground will be selected, the full frame remains opaque, meaning we can’t see any images below it. You need to use Opacity to create a separate, foreground-only, clip.
The elephant is now removed from the background. Since this is a young elephant, “green” so to speak, we’ll change its color using the Tint control in the Lumetri Color panel.
NOTE: The rough edges along Elle’s top are created by shadows from the tree above Elle.
Next, we need to adjust the background.
Select the background clip in the timeline. Since we have already isolated the elephant in the upper track, we can apply as many effects to the lower clip without them affecting the subject. In other words, you don’t need to assign a mask to the lower clip.
So, here, I blurred portions of the background using Focus Blur so that Elle’s feet are in focus, but the background behind her is not. (This gives the illusion of depth of field.) Then, I lowered the Exposure settings to darken the look.
NOTE: Focus Blur tends to create halos around edges. Other effects don’t seem to create these. It also tends to make images look like small toys.
SUMMARY
The Object Mask provides significant flexibility in separating foreground from background. It is especially good at selecting fine details – like hair – and the movement tracking, while not perfect is very fast and generally good enough for most projects.
