Luminosity Masks in Lightroom / An Adobe Lightroom Classic 2020 Tutorial

chances are if you've been searching for post-processing tutorials for landscape photography you've probably come across the term luminosity mask luminosity masks have traditionally been the domain of Adobe Photoshop and I hate to tell you but if you own Photoshop and if you go searching for luminosity masks you're not going to find it because luminosity masks are not a tool they're not a filter they're not an action but rather they are a technique utilizing layers channels and masks so that photographers can select specific regions of a photo based on their relative luminosity value this is probably best explained by bringing back the classic zone system from Ansel Adams this was a way of quantifying on a numerical scale the range of luminosity values within a photograph from the darkest regions to the brightest and once you're able to mask and select those regions you can perform whatever edits you want to them now if you've been operating under the assumption that luminosity masks are only something that can be used in Photoshop that you would have to edit a photo using Photoshop as opposed to Lightroom in order to take advantage of the power of luminosity masks well there's actually a technique there is a method that you can use in Adobe Lightroom for editing your photo using the general principles of luminosity masks it's not quite the same as a luminosity mask in Photoshop because there are obviously no layers or masks or channels within Lightroom but there are tools and techniques that you can use that are very similar and will give you very similar results and that is what I'm going to demonstrate for you today [Music] [Applause] [Music] demonstrate this technique of luminosity masks and lightroom the photograph that we're going to be editing today is one that i captured last year in the mountainous region of northern italy known as the dolomite x' this particular area was a place known as a chi made elaborate oh absolutely phenomenal place to go and to hike and to do landscape photography just one of those kind of bucket list travel and landscape photography destinations absolutely beautiful the thing that I would like to do with this photograph creatively is there's there's really two things and by the way nothing has been edited in this photo this is straight out of camera haven't done anything because I wanted it to be just as raw and as natural as possible the two things I want to do here you know first there's the sky and the sky is obviously you know pretty bright there was a lot of dynamic range going on in this photo and the sky is a bit overly bright and the foreground mid-ground is a little overly dark it's just a lot of contrast in this image I want to retain that kind of silhouette look for the photo but what I would like to do is make some edits to the sky just to give it a little more color a little more contrast and bring down that intensity so what we're going to do is we're going to edit the sky by using a luminosity mask style technique which utilizes the graduated filter this is obviously the rectangular icon up here at the top of the develop panel you've probably used this before for dodging and burning and you know adding a little bit of vignette to a photo you know as you can see when you just drag it in like this and you know pull it down you know you're darkening the sky if I turn on the mask here the red areas show where the effect is being applied and then the effect is automatically feathered you know just like a graduated filter on a camera would into the photo itself now the thing that'll jump out of you immediately when you look at this is the fact that you know yes I have you know made some edits to the sky and it definitely looks a lot moody or more dramatic now but the problem is is that those same edits have been applied to these Peaks here in the mid ground and that is totally not what I want it's already dark enough I don't need these changes to be applied to the peak so what we can do here is we're going to use Lightroom's version of a luminosity mask and the first thing I'm going to do is I want these changes to not be feathered into the photo I want these changes to be applied a hundred percent to the photo all the way across every pixel in the photo very similar to a luminosity mask so to do that you just create a graduated filter and you collapse it down you know rather tight like this then you grab the little handle and you drag it all the way down off the edge of the photo on the bottom and when you do that you'll see then that the whole photo now is a hundred percent red like there's no feathering going on at all which is exactly what we want if I turn off the mask and just demonstrate this for you if I adjust the exposure slider it basically functions like the exposure slider in the global development settings now here is where the technique comes in which is Lightroom's version of luminosity masks so to edit the sky up here what I would like to do is and I'm just gonna go ahead and start doing this I'm gonna bring down the exposure a little bit obviously some highlights too I don't want to get too crazy with this I'm gonna add a little bit of warmth from a color temperature perspective just to give it a little more orange and yellow I'm going to increase D haze some maybe give it a little bit of clarity just to bring out some contrast and some some drama well I could do this all day but the point is is that I've applied some edits to the sky here which are you know very different from how the image looked before and these edits are being applied across the entire photo but let's focus these at it's only to the sky so to do that you come down here to the bottom of the develop panel or the the local adjustment settings and you'll see this option or range mask it's off by default but just toggle this to luminance now I'm gonna do is I'm going to click show luminance mask so you can see what's going on here what this does is you'll see in this area there's a there's a slider for range range is essentially the full it's like I was talking about before with the zone system it's the full luminosity range of the photo with the darkest pixels all the way at the far left and the brightest pixels all the way at the far right there's two handles on this slider one at the far left and one of the far right now to isolate the sky what you do is you want to remove the areas of the photo that you don't want these changes applied to and in this particular photo that would be the darker areas of the photo so I then just grab this handle at the far left and slide it to the right and in doing so is excluding everything in the histogram below the setting on this slider and so as you can see when I get up right around here or so the darker shadowy areas of the image are they've turned gray because they're no longer part of this mask the mask is only affecting the sky up here now if I wanted to I could focus and kind of intensify this selection a little bit by pulling smoothness down which just makes it a little less feathery I guess is the way to describe it or you could increase it and then that kind of blurs it across the image but then you can see that these gray areas are starting to get red so that's not really what I want so I usually leave this at 50/50 is is perfectly fine so alright so that looks you know decent enough I think so then once you've dialed it in you turn off the mask and the changes have only been applied to the sky too specific range of luminosity values in the photo and if I toggle this graduated filter on and off you can see for yourself the change that's happening nothing else in the photo is being affected I've left the shadows alone and I've left the the darkest pixels in the image alone and the sky definitely looks better all right so let's say that we want to do this again and we want to do it with the darker areas of the image well to do that you just go back to the graduated filter right click on the little handle for the one that you created before going to do duplicate so that it's covering the entire image I'm going to reset the settings for this so that we're starting over drag this all the way down and like I said before so I want to bring up some of these shadows and bring out a little bit of detail that is in some of these shadowy areas I don't want to go too hard with this I just kind of want to you know introduce a little bit of contrast maybe some texture tool this is - this is a new tool and some of the more recent versions of Lightroom so we're bringing up the texture a little bit of D haze it's a little bit of color cast going on too so I'm just going to add a little bit of green and then also bring the color temperature down towards blue so that we're pushing this into the shadows now I think that's good enough for for demonstration purposes so very similar to what we did before with the sky we're now doing the reverse with the shadows so going to turn on the luminous mask and grab the handle at the right this time and then drag this to the left and as you can see now we are selecting the peaks and the foreground and you don't have to bring it down too much you know the sky is you know those bright areas of the sky are now being excluded turned the mask selection off and then I can toggle this on and off and as you can see I've brought out definitely more shadows in more detail in this foreground than what was there before it is starting to get a little HDR from my taste but I think for the purposes of this video it's it's perfectly fine now what I would like to show you is a way that you can actually fine-tune this a little bit you'll notice that those changes that I just made with bringing up the exposure also affected the sky up here because if we were to convert or just view this is black and white the just like the zone system from earlier the luminance values of these clouds appear are very similar to the foreground mid-ground down here so they're being included because Lightroom just sees them as being the same so let's go back to color I'm gonna go back to the graduated filter select this turn on Lumina luminance mask is on now what you can do is if you want to exclude these clouds from this mask and and thus not make them quite as bright as they're being made you can click on brush up here with that then I can brush over the clouds and I can choose you know how much feathering I want in here and you know how large the brush brush size should be and all that kind of stuff now I could get in here and kind of you know get into all these little crevices in here with the brush tool if I wanted to but I mean you get the idea so at this point what I've been able to do is adjust the exposure of the foreground in the mid-ground so that we're bringing up more detail some more texture in these areas without affecting the clouds so that both of them are functioning independently so we've brought down the sky and we've brought up the foreground and mid ground just using these two graduated filter masks oh and by the way one more thing this technique also works with the radial filter tool as well very similar technique to the graduated filter tool you just create your circle and let's say that I want to bring a little more attention to these three peaks in the middle I could create the filter bring up the exposure with a slider well first I need to invert it bring up the exposure slider a little bit and then to keep it from looking a little too glowy and from affecting the sky back here in the background which is already plenty bright again come down here to luminance and I'm gonna turn on the mask so I can see what I'm doing and then drop this down from the far right side and in doing this I'm only affecting the peak those three peaks and the foreground in front of them very clean separation there I think that that worked out really well I'm gonna turn off the mask bump the exposure a little bit more and maybe even add you know like a little bit of sharpness maybe some clarity and some texture because it is the subject of the photo and if I turn it on and off you can see that I'm now you know pushing out the center of the photo a little bit and giving it some more attention so yeah I mean obviously there's plenty more I could be doing to this photo and the edits that I made for this video are just really for demonstration purposes just so you get an idea of how it works but I hope you see the potential here of what you can do with the graduated filter and with the radial filter because you can create as many of these filters as you want and then use that luminance range slider at the bottom of the settings for each one of those filters to be applying very targeted adjustment adjustments to specific luminance values within your photo very very similar to how luminous luminous any masks in Photoshop work except here in Lightroom all the edits are being made on a non-destructive raw photo which is awesome because then you're not having to edit multiple files and the fact that you're using sliders and it's just so much more straightforward and easy to use compared to the learning curve of Photoshop alright so awesome I hope you learned something in this video today if you have any comments if you have any questions any thoughts anything that you would like to share by all means please put it in the comment section below if you enjoyed this tutorial and you felt like you learned something from it I would appreciate a thumbs up on the video and also subscribe if you're interested in seeing more videos from this channel I make videos about landscape photography obviously both travel vlog videos I do the occasional bit of gear review too and I'm doing videos like these where I'm demonstrating some techniques some post processing techniques using both Lightroom and Photoshop so if you're interested please hit the subscribe button so you'll be notified of new videos when they come out alright that's it hope you learned something new about Lightroom today I'll see you next time [Music] you

Channel: Todd Dominey

Views: 30,340

Keywords: landscape photography, photography, todd dominey, luminosity masks, luminosity masks lightroom, lightroom tutorial, lightroom tutorial landscape, landscape photography tutorials for beginners, landscape photography editing, landscape photography editing lightroom, post processing photography, post processing lightroom

Id: rlIIMFCQVPU

Length: 16min 27sec (987 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 24 2019