Dodge & Burn Smarter in Lightroom: How Luminance Range Masking Changed My Workflow

There’s a particular kind of frustration that comes from knowing exactly what you want a light source to do in an image and watching your tools fight you on it. I’ve spent years dodging and burning in Photoshop, layer by layer, mask by mask, and the control is real. But working on a RAW file? That’s a different conversation entirely. When I’m doing early-stage tonal work before a composite even begins, I want to stay as close to the original image data as possible.