Hi guys Jimmy McIntyre here and welcome
to this essential guide for luminosity masks for beginners. Luminosity masks are
great way to blend exposures, among other things. They are a much better alternative
to HDR software, especially tone mapping. Now if you're not sure about the
differences between luminosity masks and HDR and why luminosity masks are more
powerful you'll see a link to a video in which I talk about exactly that in the
description of this video. So on YouTube if you scroll down in the description
box you'll see a load of links which I'm going to reference in this video and you
can browse those links as you wish. Now the great thing about luminosity masks
is that they give us really natural results. Now you can of course continue
post-processing and you might want a surreal feel or you might want a really
realistic final result but that's entirely up to you. What luminosity masks
allow us to do is gain much finer control over our workflow in Photoshop.
Now in this video I'm going to show you a free piece of software that you can
use for luminosity masks and you can also download my example images that I
show you in this video and you can see a link to that again in the description of
this video. Now I want to show you some example images of before and after using
luminosity masks. So to begin with, here we have a dark image with some
underexposed shadows but some really overexposed highlights here in the
arches. Now I used two exposures. A darker exposure and a brighter exposure and I
was able to recover those highlights and shadows in this final image here and of
course I added some more adjustments to that too. Next we have a few landscapes
so here is a seascape that I shot in New Zealand and as before we have some
overexposed highlights and the rock here in the foreground is a little bit
underexposed so I used three exposures again, a brighter exposure and a darker
exposure, to bring back those highlights and shadows and that's the final result.
For my lavender field shot here's the before image, you can see we have some
overexposed highlights and after post-processing
this is the final result. You see we've recovered the highlights there and we've
added some other effects too. And finally here's another shot from
New Zealand. Of Milford Sound. So we've got some really
strongly overexposed highlights, the foreground isn't correctly exposed for so
I used two exposures and this is the final result. You see we pulled back those
beautifully detailed clouds and of course I removed the boats in the
foreground and this thing here in the corner was from Ridley Scott's Alien
movie. I had to remove that of course. It didn't look very natural. So now that
you've seen what luminosity masks can do, you've seen the before and after. We're
gonna take some images into Photoshop and I'm gonna show you how to use them.
So now just before we begin I want to mention that luminosity masks are a
particularly complicated thing at the beginning. If you're new to Photoshop and
you're new to layers and masking, this is simply going to be too difficult for you.
You'll find yourself getting really frustrated because you don't understand
what's happening. So if you are new to Photoshop or you're new to masking I
suggest you go watch some masking videos. I've got one in the description of this
video that I made which will give you some great information on how to use
masks and what they are and then I suggest that you experiment a lot with
your images. People who usually come in to luminosity masks have experience in
HDR, experience in Photoshop so the transition's a lot easier. Nevertheless
you can still watch this video and play along and maybe it'll click with you,
maybe it won't. Now I have three exposures in Photoshop. You should only
have two of these if you've downloaded my images. I just choose three because I
want to show you one quick thing. Now you'll see that they're all in different
windows here, so that we need to have them stacked as layers. Now if you're a Raya
Pro user, this is my premium luminosity mask and workflow software, you would
just press Stack and that would stack them all as layers. But if you're using
the Easy Panel, which is my free luminosity mask software which is also
really effective, you don't have that option. So instead you see I've got my
base exposure here and I've got a darker exposure here, all I need to do is choose
this move tool, left click on the darker exposure and drag that image up and
hover it over the title here of my base exposure,
then I'm still keeping my left button down I drag it into the middle of the
image and I hold down shift then I let go of my left mouse button. By holding
down shift that centres the image. An alternative way which is quicker but
doesn't really give you the benefits of working on a 16-bit image because it
uses active selections is by copying and pasting. So we can press command and A or
control and A on a PC and you see we have the marching ants here, command and C or
ctrl and C on a PC to copy that selection, then we go back to our base exposure and
press command and V or control and V and there we go. Now we've got all three
exposures layered on top of each other. Now I always like to put my base
exposure at the bottom and we're gonna build on top of that. If I had a brighter
exposure, that would be my top layer. I very rarely use more than three
exposures. Usually just two, sometimes three. Exposure blending in Photoshop
doesn't require the same amount of exposures as tone mapping does, so two or
three usually does the job. Now the first thing I want to discuss is luminosity
masks themselves and how we make them. Well you don't actually have to worry
about that. Creating luminosity masks with a full set of
brights, mid-tones and darks takes a long time. You can do that and create actions
but you really don't need to because we have the Easy Panel here and like I
mentioned it's completely free. If you want to download the Easy Panel, you can
see a link in the description of this video where you can download it and you
can join my newsletter where I send you free tutorials like this. And the great
thing about the Easy Panel it also has other functions, like Detail Enhancers,
Sharpeners, Orton Effects, things like that which are very useful in your workflow.
And as you can see we have Raya Pro here which is really the beast of
luminosity masks and we work mainly in a panel within Raya Pro called InstaMask, and this is the professional luminosity mask panel. But for now we're
just going to use the Easy Panel in this tutorial. So when we talk about exposure
blending in Photoshop we mean that we're going to take multiple exposures
of the same scene, you can do this with a single image and I do have tutorials on
YouTube about that, but you take multiple exposures of the same scene and you
blend them together so you recover the shadows and highlights. So we have a
base exposure here and we have a darker exposure in the middle. Now as you
remember, we have three exposures here. And the reason why I added this third,
much darker exposure is because I want to show you what happens if you try to
blend in exposures which are simply too dark. So one of the most important steps
in the exposure blending process is deciding which exposures to use. So I
choose a base exposure, this is the exposure that I consider my middle
exposure the one that is probably the best exposure that we have out of all of
our brackets. And then after that I just start recovering areas like the sky and
any underexposed shadows. So in order to choose a darker exposure which is
suitable for the sky I usually go for an exposure which is darker and has the sky
recovered but isn't too dark. And the reason why I do that is because if we
try to blend in an exposure which is too dark into our base exposure, it won't look
natural. And I just want to show you what that means for this particular scene. So
we're not going to do any luminosity masks for now. I'm just going to do a crude
selection using Photoshop selection tools. There we go. I've selected the sky.
Then I'm gonna choose the add a mask icon with this darker exposure selected
and just make that visible and you see that looks pretty good. It's not a bad
selection at all. But actually when you zoom in you start to see a lot of
mistakes. And this is why luminosity masks is so important. Now if I hold down
command on a Mac or ctrl on a PC and re select that selection and choose my
darker exposure and I create a mask again and make the darker exposure
visible, look at the difference in the blending. Look how unnatural it is and
that's because the darker exposure is simply too dark. It doesn't fit well with
this base exposure. It's like putting a nighttime exposure and a daytime
exposure together, it just isn't gonna work. So we have to be careful in how we
choose our exposures and I talk about this a lot in my Art of Photography course
and my Exposure Blend Like an Expert course. So for now I'm gonna delete this
dark layer. And so we have our second darker exposure now. So I mentioned that
if you zoom in you start to see a lot of the mistakes when it comes to just
blending using a crude selection tool. So we're gonna zoom in
and look along the edges here, it looks really unnatural and if we zoom along a
little bit more you can see there's this weird white bit here, which doesn't fit
in at all and if we zoom along to the bush you can see there's a lot of
mistakes. So what we need to do, if we just look at that mask that I created.
Here we have the white area which is selected of course in the darker
exposure and here's the black area which isn't selected in the darker exposure. So
that's why we can see the base exposure in the foreground because it's not
selected in the mask. So the reason why this blend doesn't look natural and has
all these strange errors around the edges is because it's a really harsh
mask. That's just based on some Photoshop algorithm that doesn't work in this
context. What we need to do is to try and create a mask which is perfect for this
scene and the great thing is we already have the information in the scene for
us to build the mask because we can build the mask purely through brightness.
And that's what a luminosity mask is. It's a mask built around brightness and
the reason why that's so useful is that it allows us to make a gentle softer
mask which creates a smooth transition between our exposures. So before you saw
some horrible edging along the mountain, along the a castle but when you use
luminosity masks you can avoid that edging entirely. So what do I mean by
building a mask around luminosity. So if I open up the Easy Panel and you see
here we have something called 16-bit Bright LMs, well these are gonna create
bright luminosity masks and you see we have something called Masks now, a
folder. And watch what happens if we scroll through, by pressing these buttons,
the masks. We are getting more and more contrasting masks, so mask 1 is quite a
general selection, mask 2 gets more specific more targeted towards the
highlights and as we move along our selection becomes more restrictive. Now
when we're trying to choose a luminosity mask, we can choose the one which is
going to give us naturally the best selection. So which one is going to give
us a selection of the sky and not the foreground. So we
want to take the sky from the darker exposure and place it into the base
exposure. The sky in the base exposure. But we don't want the foreground to be
affected too much. So for example, if I go for let's say a 6, a Brights 6, but first I
go on to my darker exposure and I choose a black mask. So we create a black mask
by holding down alt on a PC or option on a Mac and clicking the add a mask icon
and you see we've created a black mask. So now that layer is invisible. Now if I
choose Brights 6 less let's say and Make Selection, you see we now have this
selection. So if I choose the mask, pick a brush, a white foreground, press command and
H or ctrl and H to hide the marching ants, watch what happens when I start painting
in the sky. You see we start recovering it. Now I don't think it does a very good
job. it does an okay job but nothing special, it looks a little bit unnatural.
And that's because the mask was a little bit too contrasting. That's our mask
there. So although we do need to make a selection where the foreground is dark
and not selected, we don't need the foreground to be too dark. So when we're
choosing masks it's best not to go with a mask that's really restrictive or
that's too restrictive. So I'm gonna press command and D or ctrl and D and that
will deselect that active selection that we had and I'm gonna delete that mask
and I'm gonna create another black mask on this darker exposure, just as I did
before. And with the Easy Panel let's do that again. So now with those masks created we
can cycle through again and this time go for a mask which has a decent selection
of the sky, so most of the sky is white or light gray, but the foreground is a
dark grey or black. It's not as contrasting as the Brights 6 there. So we
have a less restrictive mask a more open mask. If I went for let's say a Brights
1 and chose Make Selection and of course selected the black mask before
and start painting in, it looks great in the sky, we're doing a really good job of
bringing back those clouds but you see we're affecting the foreground too. Watch, if I paint there, we're darkening the foreground. So there's before and
after. Look at the path here loses some contrast. So that didn't work either.
That's too open, too general a mask. So instead of that we can try Brights 2. I'm
gonna create my black mask again, option on a Mac and left-click on that add a
mask button or Alt on a PC and now I'm gonna create my masks again and this
time I'm going to choose Brights 2 and Make Selection and with a white brush
selected, I'm going to press on the mask, press command and H or ctrl and H to hide
these marching ants and then I'm just gonna paint in the mask. And the great
thing about luminosity masks, when you use selections like this, is that you can
go over that area multiple times. You can reinforce your selection. I'm not exactly
sure why we can do that but it's extremely useful in exposure blending. So
look I'm painting over this area multiple times and maybe in the water a little
bit too. And here is the before and after. Look at how we're not affecting the
castle in the background, even though we painted over at multiple times we're not
really affecting it. We're not affecting the foreground. Now I'm gonna press the
zoom tool and I'm gonna zoom in here. Remember the edging that we saw before
from the last selection. You see it doesn't exist anymore and look at the
edging around the tree. Before we had these white marks all around the tree
but look how beautifully that's now blended in. Before and after. Even when
there's some movement in the trees the blending still looks really natural.
Although if you really zoom in you can see this slight black edging and it's
quite easy to fix that but that's for a different tutorial this is a beginners
tutorial. And if we zoom into the castle look at how perfect the blend is there.
There's no edging whatsoever. And the great thing is unlike tool mapping
software we haven't affected the colours, the sharpness or anything. There's no
extra noise, we are still working with the exact
same files that we have before and there's no image degradation. It's just as
sharp and the colours are just as natural. So that's how easily we can blend
exposures with luminosity masks. Now I just want to go back a little bit, just
to talk about one of the things that I did. I'm gonna delete this mask and talk
about actually creating the luminosity mask. So when I created the luminosity
masks, you'll notice that I put a black mask on this darker exposure or I made
the darker exposure invisible. There's a very good reason for that. When we create
luminosity masks, those masks are based around whatever big image we see here. So
if I create my bright luminosity masks the first mask Brights one, will be an
exact replica of this image here and I'll show you what I mean. Here we go. So
there's the black and white version of our coloured image there. Absolutely
identical. And since we want to make a good selection of the sky we have to use
the base exposure in this example to build our mask around because in our
base exposure the sky is nice and white. And remember, the areas we want to select
in our mask need to be white or light gray. So in our base exposure those
areas are quite bright. So it's quite easy to make that selection. But what
happens let's say if I delete those masks. What happens if I create the masks
around the darker exposure? So I've made the darker exposure visible and I press
16-bit Bright LMs. And now if I go to Brights 1, look
at how dark that image is compared to the other one. Before when I press
Brights 1 we had this great selection of the sky, but in this example
you don't have that at all, we have quite a lot of information in the sky. So
that's not going to allow us to make a good selection of the sky. And that's
because of course our darker exposure also has a lot of information in the sky.
So it just doesn't give us that selection. Now if that's confusing to you,
don't worry, just follow this general rule and it'll work most of the time.
When you have your base exposure at the bottom and your darker exposure on top
make your darker exposure invisible. So you can do that by adding a black mask
or just pressing this icon here and build your mask around the base exposure
that's visible. And that's it. Now what about the other
masks? Well if we want to swap this around and now we have the base exposure
on top we might be able to create some dark luminosity masks. And you notice I
still have my bright exposure visible because that still gives us the best
selection which will separate the sky and the foreground. Now look at our darks
masks, it's basically just an inverted version of our bright masks. Exactly the
same. So if I choose my bright exposure and I create a black mask on there and
choose darks 2 and make a selection. Now I can press command and H or control
and H to hide the marching ants, but I can paint in the foreground, you see, to
brighten up that area in the darker exposure. So this time I'm swapping the
foreground for the brighter exposure with that of the darker exposure. So we
can do it any way we want. I prefer to put the base exposure at the bottom,
especially if we're working with three exposures, but we can be flexible with
how we do it. And we can still come out with a really natural blend. And this is
what our mask looks like, just in case you're curious. Now if you want to work
purely in 16-bit and you don't want to use any sort of selection, we do have a
quicker way of applying your masks and these are 16-bit masks. So whenever you
use an active selection like that, even if you're working in 16-bit, the active
selection is always in 8-bits. There's no getting around that
unfortunately, it's simply a limitation of Photoshop. But we can get around it in
the sense that we can create our masks and simply apply them directly to the
layer. So let me show you what I mean. I'm gonna make that darker exposure
invisible, choose my bright exposures just as we did last time and just as
before I'm going to go to Brights 2 and now you can see our Brights 2 mask.
I'm gonna select our darker exposure and just choose Apply Mask and so now we've
blended those exposures. You see, there's the before and after. Now it doesn't
quite look as good because the problem with applying the mask directly to the
image is that it's applied to the entire image but also we don't get the benefits
of being able to go over the mask multiple times to
reinforce our selection. Before when we had the marching ants we could paint
over the same area a couple of times, just to bring through more of those
clouds, but in this example we can't. So you see in the mask we have some darker
areas in the clouds, so that's not bringing through all of those lovely
detailed clouds in the darker exposure. So usually I recommend painting in the mask
using the Make Selection option. And we won't use this now but we also have
something called 16-bit mid-tone luminosity masks and those are selecting
primarily the mid-tones, as you can guess. And this is what the mid-tone masks look
like. Now I'm gonna show you one more example of how we can exposure blend
with luminosity masks, but we can also use luminosity masks for a lot of
different ways. Because we're making selections using brightness, we can add
for example warmth just to highlights or cold tones just to shadows. We can add
extra details to our shadows or extra details just to our mid-tones. The
possibilities are almost limitless with luminosity masks. But now let me show you
the next example very quickly. Okay so here we have a darker exposure on top
and a brighter exposure on the bottom. So that's our base exposure on the bottom.
We want a nice bright image so we can get these cool light trails along here.
Now I actually think we could probably just do this with one exposure but I
think it's a good example to show you how to exposure blend. I'm gonna zoom
in and we've got the darker exposure visible. Now if we make that invisible
you see we have some overexposed areas there, in the building, in front of us and
to the right here. So we want to make a good selection which will only target
the brightest parts of this image. Now before we chose a slightly less
restrictive mask but now I'm gonna choose a more restricted mask. So again
I'm making my darker exposure invisible, I'm creating some bright luminosity
masks and now we can cycle through our masks. If I go for something like a
Brights 1. So I'm going to create a darks mask on my darker exposure, then I
go for Brights 1 and I choose Make Selection, choose the mask, white paint
brush, hide the marching ants and look if I paint, you can see we're darkening the
sky around the building. So there's the before and after.
And that isn't what we want, we just want to affect the area in the top of the
building there. So we want a very restricted selection this time. So I'm
going to deselect any marching ants I have and choose my luminosity masks
again. And now we're going to cycle through and we're going to look for a
selection which chooses just the areas in the building and not the sky. So look
at Brights 1, that's too general. Brights 2 is also a little bit too
general because the sky is still about 50% gray, I think that might be affected.
But if we choose a Brights 3, I think that's going to give us a really good
selection because the sky around the building is dark and only the lights are
selected. So if I press Make a Selection, choose the black mask just as before,
press command and H or ctrl and H to hide the marching ants. Now I'm going to
choose a smaller brush and then with an opacity of 100% I'm just going to paint
in that building and you see we're not going around the edges at all. All of the
changes are staying within the building. Now I should point out actually, a really
important point, is to make sure your flow is at 100% and
smoothing, if you're using CC 2018 is also set to 100%. If you don't have flow
to 100% your blending is gonna come out really patchy so try and remember to
keep flow at 100%. Now with this building I'm going to choose a
slightly larger brush and just paint in that information there. And now I'm gonna
zoom in let's say into this area here. With a large brush we're just going to
recover some of those areas too. And maybe some areas in the street in the
foreground and the shop sign. You see we're keeping within our selection the
whole time. And what about this shop front here? There we go.
So as you can see, sometimes there is a very important use for more restricted
masks. We don't always go for a more general mask, sometimes restrictive masks
are really important too. And that concludes our beginners guide to
luminosity masks. Now as I mentioned before this is a
particularly complex thing and I move quite quickly here to cover a lot of
information in this tutorial. If you want to take your post-processing further I
have lots of free tutorials on YouTube but I also have an Exposure Blend Like
an Expert course which teaches you how to use exposure blending with Raya Pro
and I have the Art of Photography, where you don't need Raya Pro. And that teaches
you shooting and really advanced post-processing. But that's a little bit
more on the advanced side. But until then I hope you've enjoyed this tutorial and
I hope it's made you curious about taking this a little bit further. Like I
mentioned there are some more challenges you're gonna face along the way but you
have a few more skills with which to approach them and if you get stuck the
internet is definitely your friend here. So thank you very much for watching this
video. I hope you enjoyed it.
