Luminosity Masks - What the Heck Are They?

why everybody mad close Kowski here and I want to welcome you to the first of two bonus videos for my upcoming luminosity masking course in Photoshop that comes out on October 4th but I've got a free tutorial for you here basically what the heck our luminosity mask what the heck are they why should you care I think that will get covered inside of this video because they can be pretty powerful we've got a lot of ways to make selections inside a Photoshop and I think when you see the ways that you can blend and soften and feather a selection and a selection edge with a luminosity mask especially for landscape photography I think you're gonna see some real powerful stuff inside of there one quick thing before we dive in is make sure you stop by Matt Kay comm slash luminosity I'll put the link into the description you can sign up for email updates and not only to get notified when the course comes out because I'll let you know when it comes out on October 4th but most importantly I do my biggest discount when the FIR the course first comes out and I do a lot of extra little kind of bonus things to help the learning process when the course first comes out as well so you'll be the first to get notified when that happens let's go ahead and dive in so we're here inside a Photoshop and I've got a very simplistic document open just different degrees of from white to black and it'll give me a chance to kind of display what's going on with the luminosity mask before we jump into a photo here so here you can see we've got white in the middle we got black on the side well we're gonna create a luminosity mask alright and one of the ways that we can do that is we head over to the channels palette and we hold down the command click the command key on the Mac or the control key on the PC so what you're gonna do is command or control click on the RGB channel and that's going to put a selection out there it's actually the selection just looks like it's a circle but it actually has a different level of detail in it okay everything is not selected the same as you're gonna see in just a second here but we're gonna put a selection around this we're gonna head back over here to our layers panel and we're going to add a curves adjustment layer if you don't see the adjustments panel over here just head over here to the wind menu you can go down there to adjustments that'll show it and now we're gonna add a curves adjustment layer and when you look at this curves adjustment layer if you pay attention to the mask that we just created here and by the way we can option or alt-click on that mask to see it it's gonna look exactly like our photo because we just have different degrees of white to black here but that's that's kind of a tell about that selection even though that selection just looked like a circle it was more than that that selection had all these different gradations in it it's just Photoshop can only show you the marching ants so that's why it just looks like a circle so what we've done is we've created a selection of the luminance in the photo all right we've created a selection of the luminance the luminosity values in this photo and we did that by command or control clicking on that RGB Channel okay and when we get to a photo you'll see how it actually looks a little bit different but again in this case it looks the same as our image so we've created a selection of the luminance and now it's up to us to do something with it so we decided to add a curves adjustment layer I'm gonna double click back on this adjustment layer and now that I have a selection of lumens what do we sometimes want to do when we get the brighter parts of the photo we want to pull back sometimes we want to pull back on our highlights it's very similar if I go over here into Lightroom or I was inside a Camera Raw and I go over here to my highlights and kind of pull back on that it's very similar to that process here so I can go to my curve and I can pull down all right and you see it's making the bright stuff in the photo darker and we're pulling back on the bright things on the photo and we're making them darker well what's pretty cool about this is now that we get a selection of our luminance all we have to do is reverse that selection and now we have a selection of the opposite which is going to be our dark stuff in the photo so an easy way to do this is let's just duplicate this curves layer command or control J that makes a copy of it I'm gonna double click on it it opens up that curves layer and I can just drag that point off the screen that resets it so now it's not now this curve layer doing absolutely nothing to the photo but now I can go and I can click and I can move up upward and now it's making my luminance brighter the selection of the luminance brighter well that's not what we want to do in this case right we wanted to reverse this we wanted to take the luminance selection which Photoshop gives us a nice easy way to do that in the channels panel we wanted to take that luminance selection and we want to reverse it so now all I have to do is go to this layer mask and just go to image adjustments and go down here to invert invert takes what's white and makes it black it takes oh it's black and makes it white so now let's go back over here to my curves adjustment so now this is very similar if you look it's not affecting the inside it's affecting the outside watch okay see now it's affecting the outside of the photo so it's kind of like working in the shadows again if we go over here to Lightroom or we were in Adobe Camera Raw or just about any photo editor out there has a shadows adjustment and we're able to go in there and adjust the shadows okay now whether you know what's happening or not when we do highlights and when we do shadows inside of Lightroom or Camera Raw it actually is building a mask in the background all right you don't see it but if you've ever been into the detail panel and you can do the same thing in Adobe Camera Raw and you've added any sharpening a little trick we can use is to hold down the option or Alt key and we can drag this masking slider and we can see that Photoshop or Lightroom is building a mask inside of here and we can get a preview of what that mask does now I can move this slider without it and it'll work but I can get a preview by holding down an option or all of what it's doing well the the shadows and the highlights don't give us that ability to use that keyboard shortcut but that's exactly what it's doing is it's building a mask and it's it's just it's doing it on the fly okay so now we know we can come in here and we've got our highlights that we're working with on this layer where we can make them brighter or darker and then we've got our shadows where we're working with them this layer and we can make those brighter or darker all right so now let's switch over to a photo okay let's let's talk a little bit more real-world here so we've got a photo and what I want to do is I want to make the sky darker and I've got a lot of foreground area here that I want to make brighter well and go over here to my channels palette and I can hold down the command or control click key and I can click on the RGB Channel and it's gonna put a selection around the luminance in the photo and then what I do is I come down here to the bottom of the channels palette and I create a new channel alright so I'm just gonna click that create new channel button it's the one that's a it's basically a rectangle with all dot poked out in the middle of it I'm going to create a new channel and then if I click on that channel I now have it looks like a black and white rendition of the photo but it really is a selection of the luminance the white areas are most selected the gray areas are kind of selected the black areas are not selected well Photoshop has another cool feature which lets us refine this a little bit because maybe maybe you know the white areas are selected but there's a lot of white and gray areas inside of this and I don't know that I want to really affect them that way so I can hold down it's that it's that humongous keyboard shortcut it's basically the whole left-hand side of the screen the keyboard it's command option shift on the Mac or ctrl alt shift on the PC and I can click on that that channel that I created I can click on it again and that refines my my selection a little bit more and then I can create a new channel now I have a new luminosity mask that second one here that's even further refine and I can do this again I can command option shift click on this mask and then I can create another channel all right and then I'm just gonna go up here and deselect and as I click through these little channels here just think of them as selections okay their masks their selection don't let the word channel get in the way here because you're we're really never ever gonna do anything in the channels palette except load these as a mask okay so you can see there's the first one there's another one that's more refined here's another one that's even more refine now I think we're getting somewhere now you can look what's what remember what's white is selected what's black is not so what's white whatever is white is gonna be affected when we do an adjustment wherever there's black we're not gonna see anything happen inside of that area so what's really nice about this I'm gonna call out a couple of nice things about the the luminosity mask what's really nice is that number one it does a really great job of showing the spots that have happened my sky and that I needed to clean my sensor number two more importantly is look at how the sky is gradiated all right when we darken the sky I don't always want to darken it at the same rate you know sometimes I want to do the brighter areas more in the darker areas a little bit less look out and look how it's even gotten part of the reflection down here so we get a nice smooth blended type of a selection here and that's one of the benefits of a luminosity mask so here's what we're gonna do we have our mask we're gonna command or control click on this mask the third one that I created or command or control click on that and that's gonna put a selection around it okay remember at its core a luminosity mask is just a selection of the luminance in the photo it's all it is what we do with it then becomes a whole different ballgame but that's all it is it's just a selection mask is a selection luminosities are the bright stuff so we're making a selection of the bright stuff we're gonna click back on RGB I'm gonna go over here to my layers panel and I'm gonna add that same curves adjustment that we did before and now I can pull back on that and you can see how we're starting to adjust the sky in a little bit of a different way and what's nice about that is that it's adjusting the sky a little bit you because if you look at our masks remember it was gray up in the sky but the peaks they were almost white and so we're also pulling down those bright highlights those really bright spots on those mountain peaks that are in the distance there so that helps out a lot too now I want to kind of compare this to you because another typical way that we would do an adjustment and and here's the big thing with luminosity mask on I got to get this out and I want to make sure I get this out in this first video do not think this is a be-all end-all this is these these are masks these are techniques that I use when I feel that I need them and I feel this photo lends itself very well to them because one of the things I would normally do to a photo is I would grab my quick selection tool and I would go up here and I would just make a quick selection of the sky all right and we can do the same thing we can go to our curves adjustment layer and I can pull that down now again sometimes that technique works great when I tried it on this photo what I started to notice is it's a very very harsh selection and the command or control + to zoom in and you know what I'm gonna do guys hold on a second I got to do it I'm gonna hit the letter J from my spot removal tool it's just it's totally bugging me um that's this go in there and get rid of that and then let's go or is there now there's another one I just I got to do it okay back back to our story so as i zoom in i'm gonna zoom in on the peak up here look at what it's doing see that harsh line that we have there as I adjust this well let's go ahead we can see our mask we can option or alt-click on our mask to see it that's the mask now let's option or alt-click on the luminosity mask see the difference see how blended the luminosity mask is versus the mask that I created with my quick selection tool again I'm not saying the quick selection tools bad in fact I live by the quick selection tool in so many different cases this is one of those times where it would be more work than anything for me to get the quick selection tool to do what this luminosity mask did with really just a few clicks because look at how nice that transition is and what it translates to in our photo is as I make this adjustment you can see those harsh lines that start to appear and if I turn this one off and I turn the other one back on look at how nice and blended let's see if we can uh see if I can move this off to the side for you let's you can see how nice and blended that transition automatically is I didn't really have to do any work to it it's automatically that way and I can't like no matter what I do I really can't get it to look like the other one did okay so that's a big benefit there and but also hopefully you see it as a lesson in that there there's these are just different techniques okay these are a little these are things you put into your repertoire of tricks that you dig into depending on the photo and depending on how you're editing that day and sometimes just depending on your mood some days you want to do something quick some days you want to spend a little bit more time so just to kind of complete this what I'll do is I'll press command or control J on my curves layer that we had before and that makes a duplicate copy of it remember we have our mask so this one was for the highlights the bright areas now we have another one so I'm going to go click on that mask image adjustments invert and then I go over here and I take my curves adjustment layer and now I can move it the other way now I can open up and get some more detail in some of those darker areas it's just the inverse of what I did before once I get a selection of the luminance in my photo I now have a very easy way to flip that and get the exact opposite of it and then the last thing that I'd say you know guys this is the luminosity masks are a great starting place but they'll never ever take away the need for us to go to the mask itself and I can tell that maybe a little bit too much of this this little peak over here is getting some of the masks it's getting blended in there a little bit so there's nothing stopping me from taking kind of a lower opacity brush and going up here and brushing in some of those areas up there if I kind of feel like it might be bleeding in and that's an important that's an important concept to get nothing nothing we do inside a Photoshop is going to be one-click works forever and ever and ever perfectly it's always good to know that some of these things are starting place and then there's times where you're gonna have to go in there and you're gonna have to modify it a little bit on your own

Channel: Matt Kloskowski

Views: 55,888

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Id: QlbbA71fXoo

Length: 15min 55sec (955 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 27 2018