Death Valley National Park consists of over three million acres of protected desert terrain straddling the California-Nevada border. Many of the popular photography spots, including Mesquite Flat Dunes, Badwater Basin, and Zabriskie Point, are accessible by paved roads and well-marked parking areas, making them manageable even for those unfamiliar with desert travel.

I was editing a coastal landscape recently, one of those tricky ones where I needed to mask off the sky from the rest of the landscape, but masking is quite challenging in Lightroom compared to Photoshop. Lightroom is notorious for generating halos or other kinds of digital artifacts when using its masking tools. However, this time, I reached for Lightroom’s new “Select Landscape” mask, expecting another questionable result.