Blown out skies can ruin an otherwise great landscape photo. In this tutorial, we’ll walk through how to use a gradient mask in ON1 Photo RAW 2026 to target overexposed highlights and recover detail without darkening your entire image.
You’ll learn how to:
- Detect highlight clipping
- Apply a gradient mask for precise local adjustments
- Recover detail in clouds
- Protect foreground tones while fixing the sky
This is a fast, practical workflow you can apply to almost any landscape image.
BeginnerON1 Photo RAW2026Dylan KoteckiTips & TechniquesEditExposure & LightLandscapeMasking & SelectionsLocal
On February 23, 2026 at 1:47 am Jude Pereira wrote:
Thank you!!! Please keep these tutorials coming, they really help.
On March 2, 2026 at 6:38 am Pradeep Kumar wrote:
I want regular tutorials like these. Please keep posting.
On March 2, 2026 at 7:22 am Kathy Rodgers wrote:
Excellent tip – thank you!!
On March 2, 2026 at 7:43 am LARRY FANSLER wrote:
Thank you!!! Please keep these tutorials coming, they really help.
On March 2, 2026 at 7:51 am John Anderson wrote:
Thanks, Dylan. I do forget to consider the gradient mask in some of these less obvious situations. But, why wouldn’t you just use the “Sky” mask to fix a blown-out sky?
On March 2, 2026 at 10:59 am Inder Daftari wrote:
A great tip. Thanks a lot
On March 2, 2026 at 2:28 pm Peter Bye wrote:
Thanks. I have the same question as John Anderson. Why not just use the “sky” mask to select the sky. It may be necessary to adjust the mask a bit, especially where it meets the snow, but there would be no need to adjust for having darkened the mountains.
On March 4, 2026 at 8:41 am Barry Cookson wrote:
More on daily tasks such as swapping faces between groups
Solving issues in portraits such as not being able to auto remove red eye.
Ability to add shapes eg arrows to photos.
On March 5, 2026 at 1:10 pm Phillip Burn wrote:
Another option would be to use Local adjustment, select sky and use that mask to do the same. I have been doing this to a lot of my photos with blown out highlights in the sky. I usually use the highlights slider and sometimes combined with exposure to get a very satisfactory result. Admittedly I sometimes have to brush out areas close to the horizon that the mask assumes is part of the sky.