Masks

Every adjustment in Macro Studio is masked — it only applies to the pixels in the currently-selected mask. The MASKS section of the Editor sidebar lets you switch between masks, refine them, and visualize what’s covered.

The mask types

The MASKS panel has two rows of buttons. The top row is the three content masks — derived from the image itself — and the bottom row is the two gradient masks plus the freehand Brush.

Mask	Covers	Best for
Global	Every pixel	Overall exposure, white balance, color correction.
Subject	In-focus pixels that change across the stack (i.e. your in-focus macro subject)	Subject-only sharpening, texture, clarity, color emphasis.
Background	Pixels that stay defocused throughout the stack (the inverse of Subject)	Smoothing bokeh, killing background noise, cooling/warming the backdrop independently.
Radial	An ellipse you position on the image, with a soft feathered falloff	Spotlighting the subject, vignetting or darkening a bright corner, a local pop in one spot.
Linear	A graduated gradient that ramps across the frame between two lines	Grading exposure or color across the frame — toning down a bright top edge, warming the foreground.
Brush	Whatever you paint by hand	Touch-ups, anything the auto-detected or gradient masks miss.

You can adjust each mask independently — every slider in the ADJUSTMENTS panel stores a separate value per mask. So you can warm the subject and cool the background, sharpen the subject and smooth the background, all on the same image.

Visualizing what’s masked

The eyeball icon to the right of the mask buttons toggles a magenta overlay that shows you exactly which pixels are covered by the current mask. Magenta = in the mask; clear = not in the mask. It’s a verify-only view — it never affects the saved output.

Most of the time you won’t need to touch it, because it turns itself on and off at the moments you’d want it to:

It appears on its own when the auto-detected masks finish building and you have Subject or Background selected — so the first thing you see of a new mask is its actual shape, not a guess.
It clears itself the moment you move an adjustment slider, so you’re looking at the real edit instead of a magenta wash over it. No need to toggle it off before you start adjusting.
It never appears on the Global mask. Global covers every pixel, so tinting the whole frame would tell you nothing. Selecting Global switches the overlay off and the eyeball goes dark.

Toggle it by hand any time you want another look — checking a mask edge before you commit to a slider, or after a round of painting in the brush editor.

The active-masks list

Below the six mask buttons sits a list of the masks that are actually doing something — one row per mask that carries adjustments. It appears as soon as a mask has a non-default slider on it, and stays hidden (taking up no space) until then.

Each row gives you three things:

A visibility switch — turns that mask’s contribution off and on. Unlike the eyeballs, this is a real edit: the mask and its adjustments drop out of the image and stay out until you switch them back on. If you move a slider for a mask that’s currently switched off, it switches back on automatically, so an edit never silently does nothing.
A summary of which adjustments that mask carries, so you can see at a glance what each one contributes.
Click the row to select that mask for editing — the same as clicking its button in the strip above.

Global gets a row here too once it carries adjustments, pinned to the top as the base layer. Switching Global off hides your unmasked adjustments while leaving the per-mask ones in place.

Switches and eyeballs are not the same thing

Three controls in this area look alike and do different jobs:

Control	Where	What it does
Visibility switch	Active-masks list	Persistent. Removes a mask’s adjustments from the image — a change to your edit, not just your view of it.
Magenta overlay eyeball	MASKS header	Temporary. Tints the current mask’s pixels so you can see its shape.
Show-original eyeball	ADJUSTMENTS header	Temporary. Hides every adjustment for a quick before/after.

That’s why the first one is a switch rather than a third eyeball — it’s the only one of the three that changes the image you’d save.

Auto-detected masks: Subject and Background

When a stack finishes, Macro Studio analyzes the focus map to figure out which pixels were ever in focus (the subject) and which stayed defocused throughout (the background). Those two layers become the Subject and Background masks automatically.

You’ll see a Building mask… status label in the header toolbar for a few seconds while this completes. Once it’s ready, both buttons enable and you can click into them.

Refining a Subject or Background mask

The auto-detected masks are usually good, but not perfect — especially on subjects with thin features (antennae, hair), translucent regions (wings, leaves), or color-similar foreground/background.

To refine: with Subject or Background selected, click Refine Mask below the mask buttons. The center canvas switches to the brush editor, with the current mask loaded so you can paint additions and erasures.

In the brush editor:

Left-click and drag — paint into the mask (add by default; erase if Erase mode is active).
Shift + left-click — temporarily flip add/erase modes for that stroke. Lets you carve out a region without leaving Add mode. This wins over the hold-to-pan key: if you’ve set that to Shift, Shift-drag still flips the mode here, and you pan with right-drag instead. (The default pan key is Spacebar, so this only comes up if you’ve changed it.)
Size — the brush radius in image pixels, 4–200, shown beside its slider. It’s the image’s own pixels, so the number stays put when you zoom. Set it without leaving the canvas: [ / ] step it, and ⌘ + scroll / Ctrl + scroll does the same on the wheel — scroll up to enlarge, down to shrink.
Feather — how soft the brush edge is. 0% gives a hard edge; higher values add a fade outside the brush circle, which is what you want along a soft boundary like hair or wing edges. The circle itself always paints at full strength, so raising Feather widens the brush rather than hollowing it out. Set it without leaving the canvas: { / } step it, and ⌘⇧ + scroll / Ctrl+Shift + scroll does the same on the wheel — Shift added to the resize gesture, just as { / } are Shift added to [ / ].
Strength — how strongly a dab paints into the mask. Lower values let you build a partial mask up gradually, so an adjustment through it applies at reduced effect. Set it without leaving the canvas: , / . step it by 5%, ⌥⌘ + scroll / Alt+Ctrl + scroll does the same on the wheel, and 0–9 types a value straight in.
Right-click drag (or a drag with the hold-to-pan key) — pan the canvas when zoomed in. That key is configurable — Spacebar (the default), ⌥/Alt, Shift or ⌘/Ctrl.
Scroll — zoom in/out centered on the cursor.

Pinch gesture (trackpad) — zoom.
Double-click — reset zoom to fit.
The zoom readout in the bottom-left corner shows the current magnification; click it to pick one directly. Only a plain click reaches it, and that click never paints — hold Shift or the pan key over it and you get the flipped stroke or the pan, exactly as anywhere else on the canvas.

The brush cursor changes color to tell you which mode you’re in:

Green outline + black ring — Add mode (painting into the mask).
Red outline + black ring — Erase mode (carving out of the mask).

When you’re happy with the mask, click Apply in the toolbar. The brush editor closes, you’re back in the Editor with the refined mask active, and all your existing slider settings still apply.

Click Cancel to discard the refinement and keep the original mask.

Gradient masks: Radial and Linear

Radial and Linear are geometric masks. Rather than being detected from the stack or painted by hand, you position a shape directly on the image and your adjustment fades smoothly across it — the focus-stacking equivalent of Lightroom’s radial and graduated filters.

Click Radial or Linear and the shape’s handles appear right on the result canvas — there’s no separate editor, so you place the gradient against the live image. Drag the handles to position it, then move to the ADJUSTMENTS panel and dial in the effect. It’s strongest where the mask is at full strength and tapers off through the feathered edge. Toggle the eyeball overlay to see that falloff as a magenta gradient.

Radial

A radial mask is an ellipse — by default the effect is strongest inside it and fades to nothing outside.

Center handle (filled dot) — drag to move the whole ellipse. You can also grab anywhere inside it.
Edge handles (top, bottom, left, right) — resize each axis on its own, so the shape can be a circle or a tall/wide oval.
Rotate handle (on a short stalk above the shape) — spin the ellipse.
Inner dashed ring — marks where the mask reaches 100% strength. The band between that ring and the solid outer edge is the feathered falloff.

A toolbar appears below the canvas with two controls:

Feather (0–100%, default 50%) — how soft the falloff is. At 0 the edge is hard; at 100 the mask grades all the way from the center.
Invert mask — flips the mask so the effect applies outside the ellipse. Handy for a quick vignette: darken everything around the subject instead of the subject itself.

Linear

A linear mask is a graduated gradient: the effect ramps from zero at the first line to full strength at the second, so it’s ideal for changes that should fade across the frame.

Endpoint handles — set where the ramp starts (0%) and ends (100%). The two perpendicular ticks mark those lines; the band between them is the transition.
Center handle (filled dot at the midpoint) — slide the whole gradient. You can also grab anywhere along the line.
Rotate handle (on a stalk off the midpoint) — change the gradient’s angle.

Move the endpoints closer together for a sharp transition or farther apart for a gentle one. There’s no Feather or Invert control — the spacing between the endpoints is the feather, and you “invert” by dragging the gradient round the other way.

Resetting a gradient

If a gradient’s handles end up off-screen — after a crop, or from dragging the shape too far — click Reset Mask below the mask buttons. It drops the shape back to its default position and size; your adjustments for that mask stay put.

Gradient placement is remembered per history entry and is restored when you return from Crop, Spot Correct, or Defringe, so you won’t lose a gradient you’ve positioned.

Brush mask — paint from scratch

The Brush mask doesn’t come from any auto-detection. It’s a blank slate that you paint by hand — useful when neither Subject nor Background is the right shape for what you want to adjust.

Common uses:

Boost only one part of a subject (e.g. the eye of a beetle, the gills of a mushroom).
Darken a hotspot in the background that’s drawing the eye.
Apply a vignette by hand.

Click Brush in the MASKS panel, then click Open Brush below to enter the same brush editor. The mask starts empty; paint where you want adjustments to apply.

When you’re done, click Apply. Your Brush mask is now active, and adjustments will only affect what you painted.

Switching between masks

You can move freely between masks — each one stores its own adjustment values. A common pattern:

Global — set overall exposure and white balance.
Subject — push texture, clarity, sharpness on the in-focus subject.
Background — smooth out bokeh, cool the color temperature, maybe add denoise.
Brush — paint over any spot that needs special attention.

Drop a Radial or Linear mask into this flow wherever a local or graduated tweak helps — a Radial to lift just the subject’s face, or a Linear to rein in a too-bright top edge.

Mask keyboard shortcuts

Three of the masks and the overlay have keys, matching Lightroom’s:

Key	What it selects
K	Brush mask
M	Linear gradient mask
⇧M / Shift+M	Radial gradient mask
O	Toggle the magenta overlay

They act while you’re looking at the result — not inside Crop, Retouch, Spot Correct, Defringe or the brush editor, where a mask switch would interrupt what you’re doing. All four are remappable, and each mask button’s tooltip shows its current key.

Two things worth knowing:

Inside Retouch, M is Match tone instead. The two never collide, because the mask keys don’t act while Retouch owns the canvas.
The MASKS panel is Advanced-mode only, so these keys do nothing in Standard mode.

Each mask click brings up the sliders for that mask. Move them, click another mask, sliders update to show that mask’s stored values. The image updates in real time.

Tips

Toggle the overlay often. It’s the fastest way to know whether your mask is the right shape for what you’re trying to do.
Refine before you over-correct. If pushing Subject Sharpness creates halos, the mask probably isn’t tight enough around the edges — refine the mask, don’t dial back the slider.
Brush is for the unusual stuff. Most edits work fine with Subject + Background + Global. Reach for Brush when those three don’t cover what you need.
Gradients for light and place. Reach for a Radial to spotlight or vignette, and a Linear to grade an adjustment across the frame. Both fade smoothly, so the effect never lands with a hard edge.
You can iterate. Refining a mask doesn’t lock in anything — refine again, paint more, paint less, until it’s right.