Luminosity Masking versus Blend If in Photoshop

hello Blake root is here with f/64 Academy and f/64 elite and today I'm going to put luminosity masks and blend if and a head-to-head fight well it's not going to be quite as epic as you think but I get this question all the time what's the difference between them what's the digit when the luminosity mask and blend if well today I'm going to tell you so let's jump into Photoshop because I got a lot of stuff to talk about here before we begin this epic battle between luminosity mask and blend if we got to talk about luminosity masks I'm just kidding it's not going to be an epic battle okay it's actually going to be this is the basics of luminosity mask and the basics of blend if and why both of them are important in your workflow and how they can help if you use them together okay think of them as a team and not a versus thing okay I'm going to go through this rather quickly because there's a ton of tutorials on the internet about luminosity masks and there's a ton of tutorials on the internet about blend if I've done several of them myself so this is mainly a comparison I'm going to give you the basics of each of them and kind of go rather quickly through some things okay but I've created some actions for you so just sit back relax and enjoy it so basically the idea behind luminosity mask is a luminosity mask is really kind of a carbon copy of your image in black and white but said is a mask because we know that if we edit things that are white on a mask those are things that are going to be affected by the change things that are black will not be so luminosity mask allows you to create these luminance values style masks from a black and white image of your image okay it's kind of hard to think about but watch watch me and I'll show you so the first thing I'm going to do here I'm going to press ctrl alt 2 and that is the hot key to make a luminosity mask when I press control alt 2 I'm going to go to the curves adjustment layer and then if I press alt or option here that that's the basic concept behind the luminosity mask I told you it's a black and white carbon copy of our image that if we edit this if we were to move this up and down you'll notice that things that are white are being affected a lot more so than things that are in the black area with things that are in our mid being affected also because of the spread between black to white and kind of how you you would use pen pressure on your mask okay so to prove that it's basically a black and white image of our of our image black and white mask of our image I'll press command or control J on the background copy and then control shift you I'm basically just making a black and white version of our image now typically here if I press alt or option on a curves mask here that's going to show us exactly what is going to be affected and it's going to show us on a black and white version of that mask so you see that there's nothing different between this luminosity mask and our black and white image and I can prove that also if I click alt or option and click on the curves adjustment layer there now you see the mask okay so one of things I want to show you here is that typically people will give you a highlights mid-tones and shadows rendition of your luminosity masks so if you were to press alt or option and click on that mask this shows you exactly what the mask is well you can actually make modifications to a mask you can blur it you can do all kinds of things to a mask what I'm going to do is I'm going to go up here to image go to adjustments and go to curves so let's say I was gonna give you a mid-tones luminosity mask I would create that from this mask like this this is my preferred way to do it I would bring this all the way down here so basically our mask is now all black because we just told it take all the white information out but now I'm going to tell it hey bring some of that mid-tone information back notice how this is now making a mask for my mid-tones if I bring this over its gonna protect my blacks all the way until this zone if I bring this over its going to protect my whites all the way in this zone so basically I have a very strong selection right now for my mid-tones and if I press ok now our luminosity mask is only affecting our mid-tone areas and not our whites and our blacks okay so if we go up here to our actions I've created an action for you that actually breaks down your image into all the luminance values so if you press this all luminosity mask button you press play and it's going to give you all the luminosity masks set to luminosity so it only affects your tones and not your colors what you're also going to notice here though is I've added a color overlay to these so if you click on this color overlay that's basically going to show you exactly what's being edited on your image and you can always just press alt or option and click here and see what's being added on your image - but the reason why I'm showing you this with this color overlay is I'm going to show you the difference and the power between blend if and luminosity masking okay now I've showed you the basic luminosity masking let's talk about editing with the luminosity mask let's say we're just going to edit our highlights here alter option that's our highlights I'm gonna make a curves adjustment layer for this and just bring this down so that basically I'm gonna say tell my my highlights in here to get a little bit darker so now the only thing being affected here is our highlight areas of the image and I can tell by pressing alt or option or even clicking on this effect here to show you exactly where the highlights are that are being affected now I'm gonna do something a little bit different I'm going to show you how blend if comes in okay so I'm going to duplicate this layer by pressing command or control J just to get the exact copy of this curve I'm going to drag and drop this into the trashcan okay so I don't want my mask on there what I want to show you here is how you can use blended to do very similar things so if I double click right here I'm going to get the layer styles which will open up the blending options for that layer and allow us to use blend F which is another way of protecting our areas in our image I don't want you to think about blend if as this Oh will blend if think about it as protections okay think about it is I'm going to protect the underlying layers of my image right here so if I move this over this is saying that this curve is not affecting my darks it's not affecting my mid-tones and it's only coming right in here into my highlights okay and I can make this a more natural transition if i press alt or option and begin to feather it all right press ok so now we see if we turn on that eyeball here for our effect it's very similar to the eyeball effect that we have for this highlights so this highlight adjustment right here on a luminosity mask is the same thing as this blend if up here okay we're basically selecting the same areas we're just doing it differently one way is with luminosity masking and one way is with blend if so why would people use blend if as opposed to luminosity masking and vice versa well should actually have a solid foundation and both of them in your workflow because they are extremely powerful the first instance here let's look at the luminosity mask okay so the luminosity mask if we look at this who press alt or option on this this is basically a snapshot or a stamp of exactly what we do to our image okay anything that happens to this what happens underneath this is not going to be affected because the only thing that we're affecting here is exactly what we're telling this luminosity mask to affect so it's kind of like a stamp or a carbon copy of our highlights so as we adjust those highlights this is the only thing that's going to be affected so now let's turn this off for a second let's come up here to blend if so with our blend if this is kind of like a hybrid adjustment okay because watch what happens here if I come down here and I create a curves adjustment layer and the really important thing that you're going to see here that I really want you to take away here is when we turn these eyeballs on on these different layers okay so I'm going to take this curves adjustment layer and I'm going to bring this up really high right here okay this adjustment layer is underneath all of this work up here so if I click on this one notice how nothing really changes here we still have the same effect okay this curve that we're using right here in this highlight is all the same effect so nothing's happening to this one but watch we turn this one on watch what happens now so you see our selection now for our highlights is actually growing hybrid lis based on what's happening underneath so the difference the main difference between blend if and luminosity masks okay luminosity masks are going to be a snapshot in time of a selection that you want to edit and blend if is going to be a hybrid selection based on what you tell it in the layer styles so notice when I turn this curves adjustment layer off we're back to the exact same adjustment that we made with this luminosity mask down here okay so anything that happens underneath this layer underneath this highlights copy layer here as we adjust it is going to change so we modify and move this curves adjustment layer it's modifying and moving that a curves adjustment layer and affecting all of these highlight areas as those highlight areas grow we turn that layer off on the bottom and we're back to where we were from square one because nothing has changed underneath the difference between the luminosity mask though is that the luminosity mask is not going to change regardless of what we do to this top layer why because it's only selecting that one instance of highlights and at this point those highlights are being really blown out by what's going on underneath but this one allows us to give to give us a hybrid hybrid movements of what's going on underneath it based off of the highlights that are coming in from below so that's really the main difference but I don't want you to have this narrow-minded thinking that you only have luminosity masks or blend if you can use both so here's what I'm going to do I'm gonna go in here and I'm going to create a luminosity mask right here I'm just gonna say only mid-tones for my mid-tone areas and with this adjustment I'm gonna do something like I don't make it really dark okay I'm gonna just squeeze this in and make it really dark and notice how what's happening in the sky really like what's happening in the sky with this only mid-tones and I could come down here and I could start masking this area out but watch what happens if I come down to this action and I say only mid-tones now what's happening I'm basically telling it that I only want the mid-tone areas of the mid-tones to be affected so if I were to come in here and say clear my blend if by pressing play on this you'll notice it's now affecting everything I go back here and press only mid-tones it's only the mid-tone areas of the mid-tones okay so you get dual protection so let's go ahead and click this visit visual eyeball on so we can see what's happening here if I say clear blend if alright notice how the area that's actually being affected here is everything that this luminosity mask is telling us right but if I were to say only the highlight areas of that notice how we're only affecting the highlight areas of the mid-tones of this image now this is kind of kind of mind blowing a little bit here okay so I'm trying to take it slow to give you an idea of how these can be used together this mask right here is telling us that it's only going to allow the mid-tones of our image to be affected but with our blend if principles that we have here because of what we selected in our action he or saying you can only affect the highlight areas of those mid-tones this level of editing is not for the faint of heart okay this little editing is for people who have a little bit of understanding of masking definitely have some understanding of luminosity masking and also have an understanding of blend if but I want to tell you this when you actually learn these things and take the time to understand them what's happening with blend if what's happening with luminosity masks you unlock a whole new potential of editing in your images that was never there before okay it's extremely powerful and you can say I like the effect that's going on here but I don't like what's going on here or here and where you really can use this is when you're color grading your images or adding textures to your image they become really powerful so if we were to do this if we were to come in here and add a solid color layer and make make that solid color layer maybe an orangish color okay and then with this orders color we drop the opacity a little bit maybe change this to color some kind of color grading the image now I can come in here and say okay I like what it's doing the photo but I don't like how it's affecting the entire thing we can press play and say okay only affect those highlights or only affect those mid-tones or only affect those shadows so notice how this can be very effective when you're color grading images or if you're using things like textures because now you could say hey texture only apply yourself to the mid-tones only apply yourself to the highlights only apply yourself to the shadows or you can even get a luminosity mask for further protection all right so I know the stuff that I've shown you here is extremely heavy okay this stuff is kind of difficult to take in one sitting you might have to watch this video several times in order to understand it but another thing that I've done here is I've created a series of actions for you that do a lot of this work for you so that you can experiment with them what you're going to see in this is some luminosity mats for only your highlights only your mid-tones only your darks and another one here that will select all of your luminosity masks and give you a selection of all three of these and then down here I've got only highlights only mid-tones only shadows which are going to be your blend if settings where if you press play on those it'll automatically do some of the blend if stuff to protect certain areas so what that means is that you only want your mid-tones to be affected by what it is when you click and press play on this okay beyond that and the zone system Express you'll see a lot of the stuff in his own system Express which is an extension that I've created for Photoshop these are kind of like luminosity masks that are right in here that do certain selections for you much more than just the three that you have here but also in the zone system express you have down here only darks no darks only mids only lights only in no lights you see that I've taken that those blend of principles and put them right here into this extension as well so it's very useful extension but it also comes with a ton of Education to teach you how to use this stuff on a different level so kind of like what you see here this is like a 15-minute crash course on luminosity mats and blend if there's own system expresses several hours of content on how to do this stuff so the basic basic principles here the basic differences luminosity masks are a snapshot of a selection okay when you modify anything on that it's only going to affect that snapshot of that selection but blend if blend if is a hybrid adjustment when use the blend if and those protection principles anything that happens underneath that is going to affect what you told it to protect so if the image gets darker underneath your your selection might expand or contract based on what you've selected in that underlying layer protection area okay so it's really cool because let's say you're doing noise reduction are sharpening those are great ways to use blend if because if you put those at the top of the stack whatever adjustment that you created with that at the top of the stack will only affect those mid-tones or those highlights as it goes through and as those things change underneath let's say your shadows get darker well it'll keep protecting that area based off of what you told it to protect in the blend F principals I've been messing around luminosity mass and blend it for a long time and I understand that in one sitting this is very difficult to to take in but experiment it's the only way you're gonna get better with this stuff experiment so again my name is Blake grutas please download those actions and consider taking a look at the zone system Express because there's a lot of really cool stuff in there for you to see thanks again for taking the time to watch this [Music] [Music]

Channel: f64 Academy

Views: 61,411

Keywords: Luminosity Mask, Blend If, in Photoshop, Luminosity Masks vs Blend If

Id: 5HTIoPfg1iA

Length: 15min 35sec (935 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 15 2016