Masking inside Adobe Premiere Pro has always been one of those tasks that feels more complicated than it should be. For a lot of editors, it meant jumping into After Effects just to get clean results.
That’s starting to change.
With the new Object Mask Tool in Premiere Pro, you can now select, track, and refine subjects directly inside your timeline—no extra software required. In this post, I’ll break down exactly how it works, where it shines, and how you can use it to speed up your workflow.
Selecting Your Subject
The Object Mask Tool makes it incredibly easy to get started. Instead of manually drawing masks, you can simply highlight your subject and let Premiere do the heavy lifting.
This is especially useful for:
- People on camera
- Products
- Simple foreground elements
It’s not perfect every time, but for most standard shots, it gets you surprisingly close right away.
Refining Your Selection
Once your subject is selected, you’ll almost always want to refine it.
Premiere gives you tools to:
- Add or subtract from the selection
- Clean up rough edges
- Improve accuracy frame-by-frame
Taking a few extra seconds here makes a huge difference in how professional your final result looks.
How to Track a Subject
One of the biggest advantages of the Object Mask Tool is built-in tracking.
Instead of keyframing every movement manually, you can:
- Track forward or backward
- Let Premiere follow your subject across the clip
For talking-head videos or simple motion, this works really well and saves a ton of time.
Additional Tools You Should Know
Alongside the Object Mask Tool, Premiere includes a few extra options that can help you dial things in:
- Feathering for softer edges
- Mask expansion to adjust size
- Opacity controls for blending
These small adjustments are what take your mask from “good enough” to clean and polished.
Benefits of Unassigned Masks
A feature that often gets overlooked is the ability to create unassigned masks.
This gives you more flexibility to:
- Reuse masks
- Apply them to different effects
- Experiment without locking into one setup
If you like working fast and iterating, this is a huge advantage.
Other Masking Tools in Premiere
The Object Mask Tool is powerful, but it’s not the only option.
You still have access to:
- Shape masks (ellipse, rectangle, pen tool)
- Traditional manual masking
In some cases—especially complex or abstract shots—these older tools are still the better choice.
Cool Effects You Can Create
Once you understand how masking works, you can start getting creative.
Some ideas:
- Background blur while keeping the subject sharp
- Color grading only the subject
- Cutout effects for thumbnails or social clips
- Highlighting key elements in a scene
This is where the tool really becomes fun—not just practical.
Final Thoughts
The Object Mask Tool in Adobe Premiere Pro isn’t perfect, but it’s a big step forward.
For a lot of editors, it removes the need to constantly switch over to After Effects for basic masking tasks. It’s faster, more accessible, and good enough for a huge range of real-world edits.
If you’re trying to speed up your workflow or simplify your editing process, this is definitely a tool worth learning.
Don’t Want to Deal With This?
Learning tools like the Object Mask inside Adobe Premiere Pro can be a huge advantage—but it also takes time to really dial in and use effectively.
If you’d rather stay focused on creating content and not worry about the technical side of editing, that’s exactly where we come in.
At Creatorluxe, we help creators turn raw footage into high-performing videos—handling everything from editing and pacing to effects like masking and beyond.
If that sounds like what you need, feel free to reach out and we can talk through what you’re working on.