DEMO: Understanding Luminosity Masking, with Greg Benz

[Music] this is twitter all right great can you see my screen okay yes perfect okay so i pulled up an image here um and i've got a few things i'll show you real quickly just to kind of orient things uh this is lumensia up here um it actually comes as two panels so it's got this other panel called basics loading up in the background here um so it's kind of a two-part deal and this is separate because you know this is like the core functionality and you can sort of decide to move this wherever you want to put it and you know orient the screen kind of thing but they they come as kind of a package deal here so going through this like i said i've got an image that i've opened and i've already done a little bit of work on it so let me just show you the general principles then we'll come back and we'll actually do it so this is just a camera raw smart object that i opened from lightroom and on bottom here this is the original raw with no adjustments at all and then i went and processed it once for the foreground right and i've got you know it's not exactly the way i want it there's other things i'm going to do in the long run but i've got nice foreground color and detail but the sky is kind of blown out it's not showing me you know the kind of color and detail that i want to see in the sky so i took the same image the same raw and i duplicated it but i put in different raw values like so if we open up this one we're gonna see that you know i've got a bunch of different adjustments that i made you know originally in lightroom carried over here into photoshop and on top i blended in another version of the image for the sky and it has this mask on it which is allowing me to replace the sky essentially so we've got the foreground and then i'm layering the sky on top of it exact same image but inside of it i've made a different set of choices with the various sliders in here and so you would never get that kind of precision to apply just here versus just here and even if you could the local adjustment tools in photoshop if we were to go and pull up like a gradient you know you just have this set of controls versus you know normally in photoshop let me escape that normally in photoshop you've got all these other things the color grading the calibration all these other you know the curves these are tools you can't do locally so by processing this image twice and then just bringing forward the sky i get a much better looking result and you can see in the detail here these clouds are still a little bit blown out so i actually process the sky a second time to blend in a little more sky detail and i probably need to back this one off a little bit and get just kind of the perfect amount of you know sky there to fix things but i've got multiple layers and this is not a finished image i still would want to look like i still want to do a lot of other changes to it to bring it home but i want to show the basic setup and if we look at this mask here you can see that this is the layer mask and what this is telling photoshop with the layer mask is white reveals and black conceals so this is saying i want to completely show this sky area because it's all white and i want to completely hide this foreground from this layer so that i can see the foreground for the layer beneath it let me make this a little bit bigger here it'll probably be easier to uh see some of this so with this mask i get the sky layer and i get the foreground you know choosing the sky here and then the foreground here because this one is blacked out it's if i didn't have this mask on it if i shift click it i sort of disable it this is what that foreground would have looked like so ultimately i'd have you know one image that's great for the foreground and one image that's great for the sky but with a layer mask i bring the two together and in this mask the key to making it look really good the thing you're not going to get with the magic wand is all this little gray stuff in between and what this is saying is give me a little bit of this layer but not all of it so when i'm in a middle gray value i get partial opacity of those pixels so these transition areas in this mountain i'm getting a little bit of the sky version of the mountain here and i'm also getting a little bit of the background and if you look there you can see some of that color coming through which is helpful because i do want the light to feel like it's wrapping around the edge of the mountain i do want to impart some of that color i also have really nice accuracy if you look here you don't see like a halo or some kind of hard edge between this it's a really nice match between them if i tried to do that with the quick select tool then i'd end up with you know probably a pretty crunchy edge and things that just wouldn't look quite right so that's the the general idea of the luminosity mask so in the past in the past you would have and maybe some photographers still do this you know obviously there's sky replacement so people could use some like even photoshop to do a sky replacement in there so what's the difference then in what the mask that photoshop is building and this and and which one or is it an ore can i just use both for different reasons where do you fall on that well if we were talking say sky replacement right it's never going to give you this mask to fix these clouds here it's you know and it's going to give you one version of a mask that whatever it thinks is best and i can guarantee you that the quality of this mask is going to be higher because it's going to be based on my decisions for this image um so there's a real precision there but then there's other things we could do as well so let's say for example we want to make this stream even better well i could take this and duplicate this layer so i can just go right click and i'm going to say new smart objects via copy i can do it through lumensia but i'm just kind of showing the standard way in photoshop if i go and double click this i can go and make a different set of choices to optimize that water so we could go in and maybe push the uh the whites a little bit more maybe add a little bit of clarity to it a little bit of contrast you're doing some things that would adjust that water a bit differently and let's just kind of take that as we'll see how it goes and now in this layer i'm replacing that foreground but i don't want to bring attention to this rock i just want to work on the water here so i can add a black layer mask to hide this and then paint in the areas i want to show so if i hold down alt and click on mask and lumensia i get a black mask and i've hidden so that this layer is no longer doing anything but this is my stream layer so let's just call it stream if i can spell right and i'm kind of reaching for my wacom pen now which i really like to use for these things what i need to do is brush with white on this mask over the areas of the water and the more precise i can be the better if i paint just generally i might be painting on these rocks that i don't want to hit or these areas here i can get more precisely luminosity selection and this is where i start to reach for lumensi so i go up in la menzia and the orientation of this panel up top are basically a bunch of different presets to let you preview different versions of a mask or selection so if i click on l i'm asking for a lights selection and i'm going to go and make my icons a little bit smaller because i think at this point they're getting a little absurd and limited creates these like temporary orange layers on top to give you a preview so i've got my image and then on top it's creating a preview and i can convert this directly to a layer mask on these layers like so if i click on here i can just hit mask and i'm going to apply that preview and now i have that exact layer mask right here but of course that's not the mask i want in this case because this would be the example of if i'm in like lightroom and i guess a blend if this is what a blendiff looks like it's just one flavor but i don't want the sky to show through here i don't want these rocks to show through i just want this river and this is why you need the selections because you need that control so i'm going to go in a different direction i'm going to reset this i'm going to just alt click on mask to go back to black and if i go click on l i'm getting another preview this time instead of creating the mask in one step i'm going to reach for the sell button which is how you create a selection in lumensia and when i click it it doesn't look like anything's happened i'm not seeing marching ants because marching ants are very confusing with a luminosity selection if i hit command h i can show them and we'll just do the hide extras there we go you look at this like well that that seems awfully weird but what photoshop is showing me is areas that are at least 50 selected versus areas that are not but when you saw that mask before this whole area of rocks had something and done to it and it's not showing here so the marching ants are really not very useful for luminosity selection so i hide them but lemensi is telling you that there is a selection because this button turns green to let you know that there's an active selection with that selection active now when i brush instead of just generically painting with a round brush i'm going to be painting more in the areas that were more selected or more white in that preview so i'm going to go and hit b for my brush i've got white as my foreground make my brush quite a bit larger and i generally like to paint with high opacity and low flow which lets you sort of build up a result and then what i'm going to do is i can just go brush now over these stream areas maybe even a smaller brush and we can zoom in a little bit to see things but as i paint these areas what's going to happen is it's going to hit that water because it was more selected and it's still going to spill on some of the surrounding areas i didn't customize that mask i didn't try and eliminate the neighboring rocks but it is going to prefer them so if i alt click this now to see that you see that preferential treatment notice for example this edge here of the rocks has this really amazing precision here's the image where the rocks are and then we've got this nice precision along the edge and it's not a hard jagged edge there's nothing about this that looks unnatural or able to bring through better detail to the water without necessarily showing more detail on this rock that i really don't want to to highlight and so you see that adjustment there and so that sort of gives you an example of something that you you just could not do with blendiff or range mask or some generic function you need to have that artistry to be able to only paint in these areas and i can keep painting with this visible so maybe i go to a little bit larger brush and you see how it just nicely kind of fills in these areas um in fact we can look at this side by side if i click split in la menzia it's going to give me a side-by-side view so here's my blended image and here's my mask and so as i paint whenever i let go it's going to update and show me that reflection over there so this is becomes a way of either understanding what's going on or just giving you a little bit more quality control to see like hey am i painting over these edges because you can see for example that you know this rock here has some some paint on it and that may be not be my intent and i full control over that sometimes it's hard to see in the blended image and so looking at the mask can just be a good way of kind of checking like hey am i am i really doing the thing that i wanted to do so that i don't you know accidentally build up to some of the results let me close this other image here i don't think we need to use that but so that's yeah that kind of gives you that sense there right we could go a lot more extreme and add more contrast it's really whatever your vision is for what you want to do here the idea is that you're going to create the adjustment in raw or through an adjustment layer whatever your method of making a change is and then use that luminosity approach to reveal it in the areas where it's useful but not reveal it in areas like the rocks here where it's not helpful so it's giving that just ultimate local control over the image that is this is fantastic i mean that that that's borderline arthur c clarke magic right there very cool i'm just thinking back in the days of like the way that i would have approached this if i had i was editing this photo and i wanted to do something to the water i would have probably started by looking at the channels and stealing a channel and then running some you know contrast or whatever manipulating the channel and then painting out the rocks and all that to reveal just the water and then making my selection this seems infinitely more precise than that right yeah i mean so for example if we went and pull up the channels panel right this would be the traditional way of doing things in photoshop we could go to the red channel the green the blue and all right so the blue looks like it's better but it's not that well separated over here and so i'd have to like load this and then i'd have to like intersect it with itself which is like this weird mathematical thing you do to basically start knocking out the darker areas and if i wanted at the end of the day to just work on the dark areas then i'd have to like invert the whole thing it's pretty complicated and not terribly precise i'm going to hit command d to deselect what i had here if i pull back up this preview in la menzio sorry not clicking that um i've got this preview but these layers are here for a reason not just to give you a preview but also i don't know why my tablet seems to be like laggy here my machine is starting to do the fans it's got something going on i know it might be it might be this background recording i don't know um but uh it also lets me adjust things so i can go directly to for example this color conversion layer so the way this stack is built it's going to convert the image to black and white and then it's going to select various tones so i can go to this color conversion and i can say hey you know what like what if i want to have a little bit more sky i can pick up more that color a little bit more that maybe i want to try and have a little bit less of this here it's letting me get to be a lot more targeted with these different areas in ways that you wouldn't be able to do with the channels because you don't even have color in the channels right you need multiple channels to get at color and this is giving you that control to go in and just refine these things as you want so it looks like yellow is probably a lot of the grass if i want to have more or less grass and so i can adjust all this and then you've got this curve which lumensia is building for you and you could adjust this but an easier thing to do is lament actually has a slider so if i want to go and be more selective i can yank the slider it's using a different curve and the way to think about this curve is basically on the bottom is what are the tones in my black and white image and then the y-axis is basically how selected so what i'm saying here is i mostly want to select things that are bright this is the nature of a highlights mask versus if i click on something that's dark now i'm saying you know only select the things that are really dark so these curves are not something most people are going to adjust here you just use the sliders but then on top you've also got this levels adjustments if we come back to our lights here if i want to refine this as it is i could go and say you know what i i want to knock out these dark areas well i can just kind of clip some shadows maybe i want to strengthen the highlight selection i can bring that in and so what i'm getting is a much more customized mask or selection so i can have that precision to take things further yeah so the the general nature of lamenting here you got kind of three parts you've got the preview buttons then you got those next couple rows which will let you turn it into something let you apply it as a selection as a mask as a mask on a curve as a mask on a levels layer all these different ways of applying it and then down below are other tools to further refine it so even once you've created a mask like this you may want to take it even further so it has kind of multiple stages of preview applied and refined and that's why you have so many buttons is really conceptually just a few things that it's doing it just gives you a few different ways of doing each of them yeah yeah it's fantastic so uh as we move into this q a segment greg for folks that want to become lumensia power users where should they start if i want to dive in deep and i just want to make sure that i've internalized how this thing works and luminosity masking and what the powers are where should i where should i start my education at so if if this is someone who's not used photoshop or they're not comfortable with the basic idea of just general selections and masks not fancy ones that are luminosity-based but just mass in general i think it's worth you know reviewing those basics first and and they're not terribly difficult you know like i said like a mask is white reveals black conceals right if i go and just use a white brush i have no selection here at all i can just start brushing let me go make this a lot stronger i can start brushing through this layer and it's revealing it just knowing that that's how a mask works is important before you start getting into the more advanced types of masks and selection so i'm just going to undo that since that's not very nice um so but but i think that is the starting point is just making sure you understand just the ground floor of of photoshop and i've got various videos on that there's lots of them out there lots of great teachers um and i would learn from a variety of people and you know find who can you know teach you in a way that makes most sense to you once you've got just the basics you don't really need much um i've got a bunch of different videos on lumensia it actually comes with videos you can click this question mark button and then click on any button in the panel and it'll pop up support you know tutorials for any of the various functions so you can kind of go through and that's a little bit like the the video user's manual if you will for the panel but i find that for most people um that is suitable if you have some idea how to use luminosity masks if you've been doing them on your own or whatever it's kind of like you know getting an owner's manual in your car it tells you how to you know how to fill up the gas tank and how to use the windshield wipers but it doesn't necessarily tell you how to you know get the car around a race racetrack right um you know for that i've got a couple of courses that go much much deeper on the two most popular topics which are exposure blending which is what we're doing here when we combine different versions of the image together like this and dodging and burning which we haven't done dodging burning is where i would go and start adding depth and dimension to this image by selectively making things brighter and darker altering the color and then beyond my stuff there's a lot of other things out there um for anyone who's actually picked up lomenzia i've got a recommended learning plan that comes with it that kind of speaks to like hey here's the specific pathway i would recommend you go through these different things but i always tell people just kind of you know bite things off in small pieces i find a lot of people want to jump in to do like the very hardest things and i find a lot of people get confused by these ideas around exposure blending whereas dodging and burning i think is more intuitive to people it's a little bit um less esoteric so i think that can be a really nice place to start and dodging and burning something that can apply to any image if i want to go for example and make it feel like there's more light coming on these foreground areas i can add a dodge burn layer that's going to help do that just real quick i'll pull up like you know click a dodge burn layer um i'm going to go pick a color from the sky let's say go sample something that i want to paint into it and so the way dodging and burning works is the brightness is going to determine how much you lighten things and the color gets imparted as well so i can go and paint on these grassy areas by just going and finding some kind of a targeted selection of these areas so maybe i come in and i'm just totally playing with this here that's not something i thought through and planned but maybe i'd grab something like this to grab the brighter areas of the grass and if i want to knock out the sky i'm not going to dwell on what i'm doing here that's one of the more advanced things you can do in lamenting but i can create a selection invert it and now i'll get the luminosity in this bottom area without the sky when i click on cell so i'm just gonna grab this as it is and create this combined selection which would look like this if it was a mask so that's kind of conceptual what's going on behind the scenes here but with this now i can take my brush and you had a really low flow start to go in and add a bit of light kind of coming over these areas and i'm just doing subtle bits of building here but what ends up happening is you're adding some let's see we gotta probably go a little bit stronger not that strong it's funny there's always like a middle ground for some reason i would zip right past it when i'm adjusting this tool but what i'm doing here is just adding a bit of light on top of this grass and you see that starting to come through and you can imagine that as you do that more across the image i can brighten up the the different highlights i can take the shadow areas and darken them down and it will start to feel much more three-dimensional as i do that and those concepts i find that um people grasp onto a little bit faster even though i'm just totally zipping through it here i love that and that that technique is what you would use on like that bodybuilder that you mentioned right to to emphasize the muscle structure and just kind of make it more more pleasing to look at than the actual raw file you're going to go in and dodge and burn pop those highlights a little bit and suppress those the blacks and kind of contour right that's what you're doing when you're dodging and burning yeah so what i have right now is i'm painting in the highlights in the shadows area right so i'd probably go in and paint some highlights on the right edge of the mountain make it feel like the sun's coming kind of around there i'd start to paint in more in the sky to make it look like the sun is bursting here i'd go and darken down you know the shadows and the rocks to make them feel more cragged and you know like jagged rocks i'd probably you know light some of the highlights and water i'm basically going around every little area and trying to take the light that's already there and accentuating it in a way that draws the attention where i want it you're just kind of sculpting each little piece of it so you can spend a lot of time with the dodging and burning and i find that that's where people tend to spend the most time when they get to the much more advanced artistry is the dodging and burning and quite frankly it's the fun part it's the part where you really get to express and differentiate your image in a way that will will really truly set it apart i mean i'm i'm just kind of quickly touching a few little areas here but you know by the time we start really adding the sun and all the other little details in the foreground this is gonna totally transform this image from what is pretty flat here to uh i think i've got the finished here's the finished version of the image i worked on in the past you can see when you really dodge and burn where i've made the sky much brighter here the foreground has a lot more shape to it but then like the dark areas got a little darker you know these areas here when you create more shadow and then you create more highlight you create more shape and volume like these rocks feel three-dimensional in a way that this version feels comparatively flat to me right now it needs that extra dodging and burning work for it to start to jump off the page and and really start to feel like oh wow i'm staring down this like crazy norwegian stream and what an amazing experience that had to be yeah and it's crazy yeah i'm getting that course i want to dive in [Laughter] all right well cool man thank you for thank you for going through this i think we should open it up now uh to q a are you game to take some questions from the folks that are that are in the room yeah absolutely i'll stop screen sharing seriously see you again all right so let me go ahead and uh allow folks to unmute themselves and start your video here you go and then i'm gonna un-spotlight both of us greg so that we can just be part of the crew there we go all right now we're in zoom meeting so here we go let's dive in steven you look like you have a question i don't i i just want to thank greg again for giving us i i would say and greg you can speak to this better than i can but just an initial flavor of the control um that you have um over kind of realizing you know the photograph to its full potential i think the other thing greg's done a really great job of kind of speaking to getting a flavor for the tools here but i think for me the learning process is the bigger value adding greg you can speak to this as well the thought process that i have to go through to tune and fine-tune my images in the way that greg just demonstrated is is the real win for me because it helps to inform my thinking as a photographer better it's great to get the the end result that's all that's all wonderful that's the goal but you what gregor greg's tools do for me is inform my thinking process in a way that has not been informed before it gives me more insight both at the time of capture you know the time initial pre you know pre-production and then final production in photoshop right so my thinking process from beginning to end is much more informed i can get closer to the results that i want to get to right and lumensia is just in a way greg you can speak to this as well a means to an end to that right to that that thought process yeah it's interesting yeah what as you were going through your demo greg kind of things that were popping up in mind in my mind it echoes what you're saying stephen is just you it seems like when i go out to a location like we're we may be going to yosemite this weekend i will look at it differently than i would as if you know if i had just the raw file i know i can do certain things with the raw file and get get pretty much there but it's i don't think i would ever get to the okay this is gallery level but when i'm out there i can think yeah that sky i'm getting work on that i can i can use the luminosity masking on that sky and that waterfall right there i could probably do something with that later instead of making sure i got it in the shot and just kind of hoping that i can do post-processing later michael michael rhino you had some some questions yeah yeah the one thing and thank you so much again for doing this um as you can see the reason i don't have a lot of questions is because you're so thorough in answering all of those in those uh in the in one in this session right here but in your master classes and that i you know i can't speak highly enough about how thorough and how detailed you are on those and that's the reason why i don't really have a lot of questions with regards to the actual process itself one of the questions that i did have and kind of following up on what uh frederick had asked earlier about you know capture one and so forth and and i realize that's one of the the things that capture one that i've noticed that i can't do in terms of what you can do here on these luminosity masks again they have their luma range and you know some things that you can sort of do but like you said it's it's not as specific as you know your programs and so forth you can't do the brushes and that within a luminosity mask from what i can tell and that's where its limitations are there the question that i had was more to do with is there a disadvantage to say doing some of the raw initial raw processing of the original file in capture one and then moving it over migrating over into photoshop slash lumensia and doing my luminosity mask adjustments over there versus starting off over in the adobe program whether it's lightroom or adobe camera raw within photoshop and just keeping it all on that platform good question yeah i know it's a great question um and it's perfectly fine to do that and you should work with the raw tool that you prefer um the the limitation you'll run into is that you don't have the raw smart object right so in the demo here i you know i said hey let's let's go do something different to that stream right we applied a little clarity and some highlights and i did it on the raw right within photoshop if you had this you would either have to use you know the close enough method in photoshop or you'd have to go back to capture one find the version that matches the one that you're working with in photoshop right because you gotta start from the same place if you make a little tweak adjust it export it bring in that layer um which is perfectly feasible and i think if you work in a way where you're trying to preserve you know for example here i've got like a sky version another sky version a foreground version like if you keep the different versions of your images over in capture one then you can export something that is like you know i just changed this one thing about that version so it's not necessarily a handicap but it is a watch out and i find there's a lot of flexibility with having things in the camera raw smart objects the other thing that happens is you know i always tell people like luminosity mass and selections are great but they are not perfect and they are not meant to do all the work the the the really beautiful work comes from a combination of three things having a good luminosity selection having a you know well-processed raw image and your brush technique as you convert that selection into a mask if you just hammer away in a sloppy way you know you can create a bad result just because i have this selection guiding the tool doesn't mean i'm gonna get a great result i mean i can use a ruler on a piece of paper and i can still make a mess on that paper same same kind of story um when you really refine the the art of getting the perfect raw having one raw match the other is part of that process right so if the shadows in my foreground layer looks somewhat like the shadows in my sky layer then as i transition between them i don't have to have as perfect of a mask or even with the perfect mask perhaps it would never come together in a realistic way because there's that soft transition where it's a little bit of both um and so you know being able to do it with camera raw in photoshop is a real advantage where i can see them and suddenly decide you know what like the cyan color the shadows it's not quite right or the tonality is it's a little off and i can tweak that in a way that's not as easy to do from lightroom from capture one you certainly can so my preferred workflow is actually to start in lightroom and then bring everything to photoshop and i the reason that lightroom's in the mix for me is one to just organize all the files and two because i love virtual copies so if i have three versions of the image in lightroom it's really easy to copy from one of the other it's like almost instantaneous i just copy paste in photoshop unfortunately camera raw is this great tool but it's not quite a first class citizen you can't just do a virtual copy i can't just copy paste settings in in the same way i mean you you can do some of that but it's not as quick and easy so i like to start the process in lightroom where it's really fast and then i'll move to photoshop and then i once i move to photoshop i'm kind of done with you know lightroom most of the time it's rare that i'd go back at that point i kind of stick with what i've brought over there so there's many many different ways you can approach this and they're all pretty pretty good it just kind of depends on what you know what kind of workflow do you want to use you know if you really prefer the raw results from another processor by all means use that raw processor to my taste the differences are not that huge and the big differentiation to me is not the initial starting point it's what i do in the end you saw i blended these three layers together but you also saw when i finished with everything else that i did in the final version that i showed just briefly in photoshop how much better it looked so to me the raw you know it needs to be good um but it's not the end point and i find the differences between these tools like uh lightroom's a little better here capture one's a little better here i find it's a little bit of a wash and at the end of the day they all do a great job so i really prefer the workflow that i get with the robbing right in photoshop so i have everything in one place yeah so i'll just sorry go ahead go ahead stephen i'll just you know i'm very agnostic about tools right i like using capture one for the majority of my raw conversion for specific reasons aluminum masking being one of them but you know i used to have a good buddy that was a professional car mechanic and he generally used snap-on tools except for certain tools like his torque wrench was a german stall villa and he had very good reasons why he used the stall willow rather than snap on torque wrench he didn't have to reset the spring every time he wanted to change torque right so it just made his work flow easier right and and so for me all that really matters at the end of the day is like can i get to the goal that i want to right and if i have to start with smart objects in photoshop to get to that goal and use lumensia as in set of enhancements to do that i'm fine with that i'm not going to limit myself to like i'm firmly in the lightroom photoshop camper that capture one blah blah or the capture one photoshop can't whatever i think again the thing for me that greg has helped before my thinking about is at the time of capture i'm starting to think about how am i going to make this image be fully realized and what i'm going to do now so that i can start thinking about downstream the tools that i want to use at the right place in time to get the final to get to the final destination yeah yeah yeah that's interesting the whole the whole thing i don't know the the ecosystem the lightroom photoshop ecosystem and then the round-tripping out of third-party applications like affinity photo or capture one or whatever comes next in their luminar et cetera i think about that world and i've talked to everybody from all of these companies and it's it's interesting they all take a different kind of direction at the same problem but at the end of the day i was having a conversation with um what's his name matt kloskowski the other day and and we're talking about just why he lives in photoshop lightroom and why he loves it and his his perspective was you know what uh it would i think he drew the analogy of vegas he's like you know what you could go to vegas and you could stay off strip and be okay and pay less money you're gonna give certain things up or you could pay a little more and stay in a big gigantic hotel and have a maid service in the restaurants and all that stuff you may not use it all but you know it's there and you know it's a known quantity so his his perspective was you know what i there's more power in the lightroom photoshop combination that i could ever use as an artist i could ever hope to use as an artist and there's been great works done that i could never approach the quality of in these applications i'm just gonna use that right instead of using these other ones then there's a there's an argument of creative cloud fees and all that stuff we talked about this in the mixer greg like creative cloud fees and all that other stuff that people that people complain about i don't know you know i as i go through this path it it seems like the occam's razor is the lightroom photoshop combination no disrespect like you know steven i'm the uh i'm the i'm the tool agnostic person as well but the if if it comes down to what greg was talking about in the interview of i just want to tell stories i don't care how i get there i want to tell stories i want to make great stuff and i want to have fun while i'm doing it you got to devote your brain energy in one direction and you know not a hundred percent commit but focus on that thing to get really good at it and forget about all the other choices for a while and just get really good at this one thing so i don't know hey mark zuret welcome good day how you doing good night good morning first thing yeah it's early out there one follow-up question real quick too was it or i guess maybe a point is one of the other advantages i suppose to the adobe systems is that you're able it's when you're using multiple images right i mean a lot of your luminosity masking you're using multiple exposure you know images with that that and with capture one you're sort of limited to to just the the single image and i also am thinking of it in terms of stephen's weight uh nodding mill so maybe i'm wrong with that the other part of that is the um uh for instance like photo stacking and so forth and that we're using multiple images it's maybe just a smoother process to just do all of that it over in the adobe system and that as opposed to trying to do that over in capture one and then bringing it across still nodding no so maybe i i may be on them i'm not going to knock good tools you know regardless of who makes them right we we live in a age and i'm sure greg and frederick would agree where we have an embarrassment of riches available to us today and um you know the way i look at these tools is how can i use them most importantly to inform my thinking as a photographer to kind of get to the results that will resonate with viewers right yeah yeah it's i think it's important and we as photographers i think maybe it's it's just a human thing but yeah we tend to be tribal and we i call it that digital stockholm syndrome where you know you get locked into a certain brand whether it be cameras or software or whatever and you feel like this is the right thing because i spent i spent thousands of dollars in time invested in this and i'm gonna die on this hill no matter you know frederick i used to see when i worked when i worked as a molecular biologist in in biotech right we had different business divisions as i'm sure you encountered in your corporate career and we had competition between like oh is it better to detect this mutation that confers risk for you know uh fragile x syndrome with taqman or with uh pcr ola blah blah blah blah right and of course you'd have factions within the company you know well everything should be this or everything should be that or blah blah blah blah here at the bot the bottom line is the customer does not care all the customer wants to know does this patient have this genetic disease at birth or not right and so right it's i understand the tribal aspect of that and you know it's it's fun to kind of have discussions and dialogue and and debates about all of this for me the destination is kind of the goal right and i'll just use whatever means gets me to the destination that will create the most value and quality for my viewers right just like i want the most accurate precise genetic test right for genetic diseases infectious diseases i want you know the most consistent reproducible you know um controlled image that resonates with viewers and i don't really care at the end of the day which camp i'm in i just the destination is the goal for me rather than you know the tools i'm going to be i'm going to be i'm going to be sticking with that one i'm just going to say the only people that care about like within with leonardo da vinci right the only people that care about the the paintbrush whether it was horse hair or camel hair were other artists and the actual viewers of that couldn't give right now they're just like it's a great painting great i don't care how we got there i'm gonna enjoy the painting yeah i still enjoy the dialogue right so that's great yeah yeah it's a good dialogue but it's it's a it's an artist to artist dialogue when the actual work is for the end consumer it's like a chef to chef dialogue about what oven and knives did you use to create this award-winning dish when the person sitting at the table eating it couldn't care less they're just like this is delicious give me more yeah at the end of the day you know you invest in your your skill set i remember when i was an engineer at ford i ended up in the back seat of a lincoln town car with a professional race car driver at the wheel yeah and this guy did stuff in that stodgy old you know i mean it's like that's the kind of thing you get in for like a chauffeured night around the town or something right and um this guy was doing stuff with that car that i couldn't possibly do with a ferrari right he's like drifting we're going like 80 miles an hour on a track where like 40 was like the literal speed limit whipping through all the tires squealing it just because the guy knew how to work the tool and he knew how to drive and i think it's the same thing where i've seen amazing art yeah this guy i forgot his name some guy in mexico the other day he's using microsoft paint to make his digital creations it looked awesome yeah so i i think at the end of the day um you know what's most important is you have something to say and you have an idea how to say it right like what's the destination with that journey when you know those things then yes you will have preferences for which tool does it most easily for you but you'll probably be able to work with a lot of different tools and get good results correct yeah no for sure well cool well we'll wrap it up here does anyone have any further questions or anything you want to throw into the mix before we end it i just want to thank you frederick uh for organizing this this has been great and for greg to being a guest um i learned new stuff today as well which is which was really great so thanks for putting this together yeah and the timing of this was perfect for me too just in that i'm just getting through it let's see i'm 100 way through the dodging and burning master class and i'm about 65 through the um uh exposure blending class and so the timing of this whole discussion was just perfect and again thank you so much for watching those master classes are well worth the investment and learning experience on those the time the time i've put into those has been well worth every every hour every minute of that so appreciate it thank you awesome all right well with that we'll we'll end this thank you greg for your time today man uh it's been it's been an honor and a pleasure looking forward to diving in i'll share some of my yosemite shots with you if i if i come if i come back with anything decent that i'm uh that i'm not embarrassed to show i'll share it with the community yeah please do i'm i'm itching to start flying around and seeing the world again so oh man yeah i finally got i finally got scheduled for my vaccine so all right i just got my first one sunday my first one was sunday so i'm moving in that direction of being vaccinated very good yeah yeah as we all are very good okay all right folks well we'll see you uh i guess i'll see you guys tomorrow evening right for the for the image critique or the image competition actually all right have a good rest of your day you guys be safe and uh we'll see you soon thank you [Music] thanks this is twitter

Channel: This Week in PHOTO

Views: 5,711

Keywords: This Week in Photo, TWiP, Frederick Van, Frederick Van Johnson, Photography, luminosity masking, greg benz, greg benz, greg benz lumenzia tutorials, greg benz art, greg benz lumenzia, greg benz artwork, greg benz web sharpen, greg benz teachable, greg benz lord abbett, greg benz luminosity masks download, greg benz sharpening, greg benz free luminosity masks, greg benz photography, greg benz youtube, greg benz tutorials

Id: sZbnH9WduWs

Length: 44min 13sec (2653 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 05 2021