A Simple But Effective Way to Create Luminosity Masks in Photoshop

today we gotta learn a very simple but much more effective way to create luminosity masks in Photoshop and use that to bring the best out of your photos and if you're wondering what is luminosity mask how to use it take a deep breath my friend because this is the video for you right from what is luminosity masks - why do you need it - some advanced ways to use that to create beautiful images will cover them all so without any further ado let's get started so here we on for sharpen first of all let us understand what our luminosity masks so simple let's break it down luminosity masks what is luminosity well luminosity in simple terms mean brightness right very simple luminosity masks brightness mask now what is mask well a mask determines where the layer adjustment layer effect or filter will be visible and in which areas it won't be visible as simple as that so luminosity masks are the masks based on luminosity make sense no let me make it sense for you so for example what is a mask right so first of all if you go ahead and create a new layer and you paint something fits say okay let's paint something with red just sample stroke a mask determines where this layer is gonna be visible and where this is not going to be visible so if I go ahead and create a mask see this is a mask white other areas which determines where it is visible and black other areas which determine where it is not visible as you can see it's completely white so whole of the layers visible so I can take a brush make sure the foreground color is black by pressing X to toggle between the foreground of the background and if I paint here see this area goes black and this area goes hidden from here right if I want that back I'll press X again to toggle between the foreground of the background and just paint it to get rid of that black there and get it back now this is a simple mask what if you want to create a mask based on luminosity based on brightness so you are saying to photoshop anything which is brighter than say 50% gray anything brighter than 50% gray hide that write anything brighter than 50% gray paint those areas in black inside of the mask so we can do that using luminosity masks so let me quickly show you what that exactly means so if I go to channels hold the controller command click here it will make a selection of anything which is brighter than 50% gray and if I fill that area with black that is a luminosity mask if I turn this off as you can see it's transparent a bit of red is also gone so anything that was brighter than 50% gray it created a mask of that area and deleted that area so therefore any mask which is based on the brightness levels or the luminosity is called a luminosity mask just to wrap up if I say to photoshop if I have an image and if I say to photoshop delete or hide anything that is darker than 50% gray then I'm asking Photoshop to create a mask based on luminosity based on brightness levels as simple as that now let me illustrate something to make it more clearer to you as to how to create luminosity masks let's select the rectangular marquee tool and this is just for demonstration purposes I'll just pull up a guide to the center and let's paint half of it with black so I'll just select this area and paint it with black I'll press D to reset the swatches D for dog or donkey and alt backspace I filled that with black let us get rid of the guide now if I want to save Photoshop select everything which is brighter than 50% gray here's how to do it now this is the traditional method I'm going to teach you my method which i think is much more efficient ok let's go to the channels if I hold the ctrl or command if you're using a Mac and click on RGB it will make a selection based on the brightness levels so it will select everything brighter then 50 percent great so as you can see white is of course brighter than 50% gray and black is darker than 50 percent gray gray gray selected that particular area right very simple and now you can go ahead and create any adjustment layer any layer with that selection active and create a mask out of it so right now if I go ahead and create a curves adjustment layer as you can see it comes up in that mask and if I play with it it only affects this particular area if I want to add some red so as you can see that will just add this particular effect this particular area not this area okay make sense now let's divide this into further more shades of gray so if I go ahead pull up more guides like that I want to have it in the middle so let's just bring back the guide and create a selection and then if you pull up a guide it will just snap to the middle of it if you make a selection of this then if you pull up a guide it will just snap in the middle there we go now if I go ahead and fill this with say 33% or 66% let's see double click in there select brightness and maybe we'll go with say 33% that's good click OK and fill it up with that color okay and this one with 66% okay let's choose 66 okay and fill it up with that color now if you go to channels right and if you hold the ctrl or command and click on this simply it selects anything which is brighter than 50% gray 66 is of course brighter than 50% that's obvious and so it selects these areas but what if you want to tell Photoshop select anything which is brighter than 75% brightness okay select anything which is brighter than 75% brightness now mind you 75 is the half of 50 and hundred between 50 and hundred seventy-five false so if I want to into sect the selection into half here's what you need to do hold the control along with that hold the shift and old if you are using a Mac that would be hold command shift and option just look at the cursor it changes to a cross X which means intersection if you click in here see just this area selected it is now selecting anything brighter than 75% brightness okay but what if you want to select the dark areas it's very simple just create a selection of the bright areas control a command click on this and just invert that selection how to invert that selection ctrl shift I command shift I here using Mac and then go forward like that if you want the darkest area select the brightest area and then invert that selection its brightness levels it will select the darkest area right now how to create luminosity masks out of these selections now here's the traditional way here's what we did previously and many other tutorials show you this way hold the controller command click on that and then create a new mask click on this this creates a luminosity masks based on brightness level so bright other areas which are selected and black are the areas which are not selected right so select the RGB back again and if you want to intersect that ctrl shift alt command shift option if you're using a Mac intersect this now create another luminosity mask out of that there we go just like that as you can see this one this one now if you want to invert that select this and then create a mask this one similar to the first one and then ctrl a command I inverted now here's a warning as you can see it just inverted this particular area so before you invert it make sure you deselect that okay so let's go back ctrl alt Z command option Z if you are using a Mac then ctrl or command D then invert it control or command I right now you can do this for the same you can make a copy of this alpha to make a copy of this and you can invert that controller command I there you go select that there you go so you have selected the darkest area little dark area moderate and the brightest area right and you can name that it's becoming a little complex and you can name all of that can get back to RGB and anytime you want to use any of these masks all you have to do hold the controller command and create a selection and in the layers panel just create an adjustment layer or a layer or use that selection as a mask now let's have a look at some practical examples of luminosity masks this image was submitted by Connor mackaninee he's a really awesome photographer go ahead and check more of his work right here so if you want to darken the sky right you want to select the bright areas so what is the traditional way going to the channels and then holding the control or command clicking here this selects the bright areas as you can see it selected the sky area now you can go ahead and create a lot of luminosity masks I'm not going into that because I'm going to show you my way so the traditional way is you create a luminosity mask of this and then you create the luminosity luminosity mask of just bright areas go-going intersecting those areas and then create luminosity masks of mid-tones it is a complex methods and by the way you can go ahead and search on google luminosity mask actions and you can download actions which can create 1020 luminosity masks for you but here's the thing so for example he created a luminosity mask ctrl or command click on that luminosity mask if it didn't create the right selection for you you would select any other luminosity masks so suppose you created ten luminosity masks or ten different brightness levels and this didn't work for you so you clicked on the other you clicked on the other so you clicked on the 50% one you clicked on the 75% when you clicked on the 25% one which one whichever works for you and then come back to the layers panel and before you come back to the layers panel select the RGB and then create a curves adjustment layer and just darken it up just like that high and that works that works pretty well now what if you want to select just this area as you can see it's affecting this area and a lot more other areas and you don't want that what do you want to affect just this bright area or just that bright area and photography is an art right photo processing is also an art you cannot say Photoshop select everything which is brighter than 25 percent or 50 percent you don't want to quantize your brightness into 50 25 for half of that 12.5 you don't want to quantize your brightness you want to have the ability the smooth ability to select whichever brightness level you want and that do real-time visually and here's how to create luminosity masks in a much more efficient way alright very simple suppose you want to darken up the really bright areas off the sky so create a curves adjustment layer this is very simple okay if suggest went late created and then go to select this is important color range okay now you might think color range selects colors right it also selects brightness levels it also selects highlights shadows and mid-tones so inside of select choose say highlights right and there first of all decrease the fuzziness all the way to zero now you can choose selection preview to grayscale black matte whatever you want if you choose grayscale if they'll show you the area exactly which are being selected so white other areas which are selected black other areas which are not selected or you can also choose something like quick mask the areas that are visible are selected the areas that are in red are not selected if you want a little bit of transparency here what you can do let's go ahead and cancel that you can just select the quick mask and just double click on it to open up the quick mask options and you can decrease the opacity or to like 80% there you go and here is a very important option color indicates masked areas or selected areas so masked areas is chosen by default if this is the option the red will be the areas which are not selected if you choose selected a we as an option red will be the areas which is selected right right now let's leave it at masked and click OK and then do the same select color range and choose highlights decrease the fuzziness all the way to zero and then choose quick mask and control the range this gives you a real-time view whatever you want to select and the traditional method doesn't give you this power traditional method also doesn't give you the power of controlling the transition or the smoothness between the areas that are selected and the areas that are not selected right now we can do that using fuzziness slider right how much of a smoothness we want we can use the fuzziness slider isn't that interesting first of all let's control the range of areas we want to select so you want to select whole of this area just like that and then increase the fuzziness do you say 39 this is fine yeah I'm kind of happy with that now once you're satisfied with this selection you can just go ahead and click OK there you go just decrease it a bit just like that I'm happy with this click OK and there you go you can select the mask and fill it with black and invert it ctrl or command I and you can just double click here and control it right very interesting also we did a mistake here it's not actually a mistake we had to do one extra step now let me tell you how to save one step so when you create a curves adjustment layer and make sure the mask is selected okay make sure the mask is selected not the properties mask is selected and then when you go to select color range and do that exact same thing click OK you don't have to do anything it comes automatically previously what we did this was selected and then we did it so it didn't come automatically we have to select that fill it with black and all that stuff so we learned something all right so let's bring it out and bring the curse property out and you can just stick it in here and just drunken it don't darken it so much it will show up here so just let's stop it right there and it creates a really wonderful look now let's just go ahead and leave that suppose you want to now darken the extra bright areas so you would create another curves adjustment layer and then make sure the mask is selected very simple select color range and this time you can choose the range to be really bright areas just like that and click OK and then you can go ahead and if you want to darken it let's just darken it a bit just like that not too much it shouldn't look funky it can also increase the contrast just like this and let's go ahead and close that and have a look at the before and after so let's make a group of both of these controller command G I selected both of them by holding the ctrl or command ok let me do that again for you hold the controller command select the other one then ctrl a command G I have a look at the before and after so this is the before this is the after now suppose you want to brighten this area up but as you can see this area is looking a little strange it's not looking good here before after so before was looking good so what we can do we can create a mask for this group right and then take the brush make sure the foreground color is black make the brush a little little bigger make it softer just paint to the left-hand side once just dab once hold the shift key dab on the other side that will create a line automatically have a look so before after we are effecting just in this area now you can go ahead and expand that and work on it even more just double click on the icon and work on that even more don't do it too much if we do it too much you can see the line here it starts looking strange so stay within limits there we go that looks fine have a look at before and after now you can name this highlights okay now let's talk at the mountains and the dark areas but before we do that let's take a little break and understand why do we need a luminosity mask in the first place you might be thinking Lightroom or Adobe Camera Raw already has high light shadows to darken the highlights bump up the shadows why do we need luminosity masks here's why we need it suppose you say Photoshop darken the highlights are darkened the bright areas now Photoshop is thinking hey the mountain is also bright the sky is also bright what should I do where to draw the line which brightness level to choose it's confused so what Photoshop will do it will use whatever it was programmed with the algorithm it was programmed with right it doesn't know only you know as a human as an artist which brightness level to choose Photoshop doesn't know that it will use its algorithm and mattes cannot counter at both has to go hand-in-hand so by creating a luminosity mask you get to choose which brightness level to target you get to choose exactly whether to select the sky or include the mountain along with that you get to choose the transition how smooth the transition is so the choice and the control is all in your hand and you can specifically not just select the highlights but you can select highlights within the highlights so suppose you want to select the very bright highlights or a little bit darker highlights you can make those selections you get think of it like a lot more sliders instead of just one slider and that's the flexibility you get with luminosity masks yes it's time-consuming but it's a really great trade-off that you get for the amount of options that you acquire okay now let's target this so create a curves adjustment layer as we did before make sure the mask is selected and don't select this one and then go to select color range and this time instead of highlights choose shadows so selected other areas which are visible and selected other areas which are red so decrease the fuzziness first to zero and we are targeting these areas okay maybe let's just start at the very darkest shadows first and let's make them darker and then we'll target the mid-tones so very dark shadows just like these shadows and increase the fuzziness a bit like that please the range use the fuzziness just like that yep that's pretty good not bad click okay there we go and now let's a darken those shadows okay darken it maybe increase the contrast a bit just like that not bad not bad okay we'll have to touch this later so we'll name it shadows and now let's target this these are the mid-tones so create a curves adjustment layer again make sure that is selected select color range and then this time choose the mid-tones now in mid-tones you get two sliders why two sliders because you want to select ok select the areas from 25 percent to 75 percent target those areas we are not selecting the overall highlights so select anything brighter than we are not selecting shadows select anything darker than we are selecting mid-tones so anything brighter than this and darker than this middle right so let's select try to select just this area so we need to first make it visible there are we good just like that okay that looks fine now you can go ahead and increase the fuzziness there we go that looks fine that doesn't look bad click OK once you're satisfied you can take your time I'm doing it really really quickly ok there we go and now you can just brighten that up and maybe increase the contrast just like that don't go too much there we go that's looking pretty good okay close it now that's not looking good here so what we will do instead of affecting this mask let's create a group so that this masks stays and then make a mask of that group and then paint this area with black we are not harming okay there we go have a look before after this area is brightened now so suppose you want to add a little why Bryn's to this area you can use the same mask so select this and then create a y pense adjustment layer and copy this mask there holding the alt or option click and drag and drop it there replace layer mask yes increase the vibrance click on the properties then increase the vibrance just like that as it increases the wipers there we go have a look so before after now all you need to do just start playing with this okay let's go ahead and close it let's not name it well we can name that later and let's create a new ID in the curves adjustment layer and select color range and now I'm just playing with it just playing with it and select the shadows and they range just like that and maybe increase the fuzziness okay just like this and click OK maybe you wanna brighten up brighten it up a little bit just like this and darken it up a little bit yeah that looks fantastic for this mountain okay and I want to keep this just to this mountain style create a group and then create a mask of that and to create a negative mask you can hold the alt or option click on this mask so it comes up with the black mask take the brush and just paint with white I pressed X to toggle between the black and the whites the foreground the background color and just paint in this area there you go you just want it in this area before after isn't that wonderful won't erase that from this area there you go done I also want in this area and just paint dab it in there so have a look at the before and after so this is the before this is the after drastic difference now what you can do you can create separate curves adjustment layers and just play with it create curves adjustment layer so let's make it really bright and paint the mask completely black by select the mask and pressing ctrl or command I take the brush and just start dabbing in these areas which you want to add some highlights into right it's that simple it really adds some punch just like that done and then erase the extra areas by pressing X and then just start erasing these areas these extra areas like that and there we go to add some more drama what you can do you can just double click on the right-hand side of the layer this opens up the layer Styles dialog box then you can take this letter of the underlying layer from left to right to make sure that the dark areas of the underlying layer are deleted from this layer so that we are effecting just a little bit brighter areas so this is a little harsh so we would hold alt or option click on it and just make it a little wider break it down so that the transition becomes smooth and there we go don't isn't that wonderful have a look at the before and after before after really really wonderful now above it you can add a contrast you can add some vibrance and have a look we had created the highlights right we had created some highlights you can also add some color to it so amazing colors to it so you can choose to add maybe a solid color adjustment layer and then choose the color just like yellow or something and copy that mask into that replace layer mask ES and just affect that area and change the blend mode from normal to overlay so add that yellow nice effect now we can go ahead and change the color to whatever you like maybe I'll choose magenta ish yep that looks fantastic now maybe I'll just shark in it brighten it a bit a little bit there we go just like that and you can play with it as much as you like and I can just also copy that in this area so let's just bring it above the highlights so that we are not deleting okay so in the water also we have got that effect so you can just go crazy with this this is a really awesome way to play with your photos and also what you can do you can just group in layers right now we have grouped layers as highlights you can also group them as mid-tones and shadows you can do all of that that's secondary but as I look at this image I just wanted to hold and explain to you this have a look here there's a line and it's distracting it wasn't there before have a look at it before it wasn't there before which means the transition is not smooth so you need to find out which curves adjustment layer is creating that line so this is not creating that line is this creating that line no this is or this is yes this is creating that line have a look at this right so all you need to do there are two options right there are two options which you can do okay before after you can click on the mask and delete those areas simply and just not affect those areas you can do that or what you can do you can modify the masks just select the mask and open up the properties go to windows and then properties if you cannot see that already I can feather that out a little bit so it feathers out have a look it feathers out it helps or you can recreate the mask so while creating the mask you can keep an eye out for that so while vivia creating the mask for example this one this mid-tone mask for that curve so let's create a curves adjustment layer and brighten it up select the mask make sure the mask is select so we already brighten that up and then create a mask that's something which you can do you can go to filter you can go to select color range and see choose selection preview to none and there you can see that real time effect of that now as you can see it's affecting it so what you do increase the fuzziness there you go so it happens real time isn't that wonderful and in real time you can control all of it right and click OK once you're satisfied if you have the experience you would increase it first and then apply the selection then apply the luminosity mask and for finishing touches you can add some more adjustment layers like callaloo Kapaa let's turn off this color slipping strange and we could have adjusted that better let's turn that off and you can go ahead and create a color lookup adjustment layer and let's choose anything maybe this one how does that look or maybe aterna let's see yeah that looks fine right so have a look at it before and after so this is the before this is the after really creates a lot of difference now this is too bright if you think something is too bright let's turn that off turn that on it's too bright select that and decrease the opacity as simple as that and there you go that's how to use luminosity masks in Photoshop so there are two ways of creating luminosity masks by using the channels panel so you can go ahead and select the channels holding the controller command clicking on RGB that makes a selection of the brighter areas to intersect that selection hold ctrl shift alt click on that again that will intersect the selection and to create the luminosity masks for the dark areas just invert those selection but what about creating the luminosity mask of just the mid-tones it's also very simple create a luminosity mask of the brightest area okay so this is the color spectrum create a luminosity mask of the brightest area create a luminosity mask of dark area and subtracted from that what we get is the mid term that you can do let's not get into that because we already learned a much more efficient way so what's the efficient way create an adjustment layer of your choice right or create any layer all you have to do then go to select and then color range and you have all of that there highlight shadows and mid-tones right now we have selected the mask so for example you created a black and white or anything you want you also can create a new layer if you want and then you can go to select color range and then select whatever you like highlight shadows and mid-tones if you select mid-tones you get two sliders select anything brighter than this and darker than this as simple as that you can select the shadows you can select the highlights select anything brighter than that shadows you can select anything darker than this level and then once you create a selection you can create a mask out of it so once you add an adjustment layer also make sure just a recap also make sure for exam you choose levels make sure that the mask is selected so that you save an extra step so then you go to select color range and then you make a selection like that it already comes inside of that mask automatically and if you are working on a layer and suppose you just paint it with some random color there and you want to create a luminosity mask out of that then what you might have to do go to select color range and then select whatever you have to select and if you don't want this to be a part of it what you can do just turn it off just turn it off and then select color range and shadows or whatever okay now that you have a selection and you can create on the mask there you go turn it on this just applies in that area you can now try to paint in any color or apply any photo it will limit itself to that mask so select this and you can try to paint and say green or whatever it will limit it to that mask you get the idea so this is the final image that I came up with after playing with the curves a little more adding a little vibrance and few more colors and you can do that too so that's all for this video hope this video made sense to you and if it did make sure to give us a like and also don't forget to subscribe and not just subscribe ring the bells that you my friends don't miss a thing I'll see you guys my next one till then stay tuned and make sure that you keep creating [Music]

Channel: PiXimperfect

Views: 350,155

Keywords: luminosity mask photoshop, exposure blending, luminosity mask action, landscape retouching, photoshop landscape, photoshop curves, extract details photoshop, shape the light photoshop, photoshop tutorial, piximperfect

Id: t3zSUK7KK7c

Length: 32min 24sec (1944 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 09 2017