Quick Highlight Masking in Photoshop

complex masking and precise selections it's really going to be one of the main reasons i would ever leave my raw editor of lightroom or or adobe camera one of the main reasons i would ever leave that for a photo to go into photoshop when i need precise control over a very specific area of the photo in this case what we'll show you see here is the highlights in the photo this is taken on terms of luminosity masking where we have channels we've got tons of layers tons of selections you've even got panels that are built i'm not saying they don't have their place but what i want to show you is you can take that exact concept who cares what it's called with just a couple of clicks you can create one of the most complex and precise masks possible and you can use that anywhere you want on your photos very very quickly let's jump over onto the computer and what i'm going to do is i'm going to start off with the landscape example show you how we can create this highlight mask on landscapes and where would be useful especially over here in this top left area and then i'll also show you how we can use the same concept on a portrait photo and this would translate the same to wildlife or travel or still life whatever it happens to be okay all right so we'll start off here on our landscape photo i'm gonna be inside of lightroom you could do everything that i'm about to do here inside of adobe camera raw okay same exact step same everything could be done with adobe camera if you're not using lightroom so what i started to do here is i found i i wanted to open up the shadows a little bit on this um i thought it was a little bit flat so i went with a little bit of de-haze here i tried pulling down highlights and this is where you're going to first start to see the problem all right as i pull down my highlights number one it's a global correction so it's to me negatively affecting other parts of the photo number two it gives a really hard weird gradation to the sky and that's just too much gradation to go from bright white to this deeper blue over here it's just too much of a change for me in a landscape photo so i'm not really going to get there in a global way i can pull down my exposure i'm not going to get there and pull down the highlights i'm not going to get there so then that leads me to do a local correction where i can use the graduated filter pull down a combination of exposure and highlights and uh try to do it this way all right so once i do that and you can see the problem it's still not getting this area over here all right so now i would really have to pull down highlights a brush isn't going to do it my only option after this would be to maybe try a luminance mask we have our range masking here inside of lightroom and adobe camera raw so we could go to the range mask and choose luminance which will ever give us this whole range and we can say okay only apply it to a luminance range where it's the bright highlights to these mid-tones which would be the brighter parts of the sky and that's not even getting it getting us there you could still just see a big dip i could even try to pull this down and we're still not going to be where i want to be for for this photo you can see too much of a gradation change in there although we do get closer to me it starts to muddy uh some of the background here i can work with the smoothness a bit but again the more i work with the smoothness the contrastier that sky starts to become so you can see it's just not again we're severely affecting the foreground brushing could be an option and if you need to do this stuff quick this is not bad what i'm about to show you is for people that really want to spend a little bit more time crafting the work on their photo but what i've shown you so far is not a bad way to go it just takes away some of the control you have so we're going to get out of here we've i i've realized that if i want ultimate control over this sky i need photoshop i'm not going to be able to get this level of control inside of lightroom so from here what we're going to do is head over to photoshop i'm going to go photo go down here to edit in and i'm going to go down to open as a smart object in photoshop i don't often use smart objects i know the non-destructive police is going to let me know how bad i am in the comments but i don't i don't care for smart objects they're very restrictive however in this case when i know i'm going to merge two versions of a photo okay two of the same photo but different tonality versions together i do use a smart object and you'll see why in just a moment uh if you're inside a camera raw and you're gonna jump to photoshop if you hold down your shift key you will see an option that allows you to open it as a smart object now once we get over into photoshop i want to make a copy of this so what i'm going to do is go layer go down here to smart objects i'm going to choose new smart object via copy i can't just press command or control j to make that copy i have to do new smart object via copy to make sure it's a different separate copy what this is going to allow me to do is work on the bottom layer as the foregrounds and then work on the top layer as the sky and i'll be able to work on these separately i'll be able to double click either one of these go back over it's not going to take me to lightroom because that's not the way it works it'll take me into adobe camera raw which is the same as lightroom and i can make changes to this but before we do that let's let's do what we came to photoshop for which is put a very complex yet feathered and more natural mask into place and the way we do that is going to be in the channels palette okay now there's something called a luminosity mask we don't need to do this level of complexity okay luminosity masks can go can introduce a huge level of complexity there's panels that are built around them and there's all these different things and what i hope that you get from this tutorial is that you don't have to go down that rabbit hole you can use luminosity masks but in a very simple way that isn't really what you would see online normally so here's what we do we hold down the command key on mac or control on a pc and we click on this little rgb icon over here so command or control click and that's going to put a selection around the luminance values 50 or greater in the photo so we have just selected the luminance the interesting thing about this is this is a very natural feathered selection okay so it's going to give us much better result however i don't want it to affect the whole sky i just want this area over here so what i can do is refine this mask and the way we do it it's with a with a three key keyboard shortcut so on the mac it's command option shift on the pc it's control alt shift and you'll know you did it right command option shift ctrl alt shift when you look at your cursor and there's a little x icon next to it so what we do is we click on rgb again and what we've done is we've refined this luminance mask to be brighter highlights not quite the range it acquired before and then we command option shift again if we don't and you're gonna have to eyeball this i can just tell most of the sky is still selected by the marching ants here command option shift control alt shift click again get in there click again even better i might even click one more time in this example you might not be able to click this many times in your photo if you don't have the the extreme dynamic range that i have here you might see a message that pops up that says there isn't a selection visible so keep that in mind but it's a little bit of a learning process but you can start to do this really quick okay so now i have a very refined feathered selection all right so what we can do here is head over to the layers panel and we just want to add a mask so just go down to the bottom of the layers panel and there's a little icon to add a layer mask to it it's a little basically rectangle with a hole poked out in the middle of it just click that little icon and that will add a mask i do have an action for you that you can check uh the description if you're interested it will help you with this process there's even a video that goes along with the action my hope is is that you use it as a learning tool it can help you with this process to create a couple of different visual selections so you can see it but you don't have to you can do what we just did here very very easily if i option or alt click on that layer mask now you can see what's white is selected what's black is not that's the way a layer mask works so now this layer mask is in place okay and honestly after looking at it i mean i might even go one level deeper all right so it's again really really simple just go over here command click the first time commander control click and then command option shift click click twice click three times click again i might even go one level deeper here heck i'm gonna go one level deeper there we go i'm gonna go there okay again go back to layers click that little icon option or i'll click and now you can see we've really refined this and you can see it's very natural and feathered as well that's what these gradations are okay so option all click to get back to normal now we just need to make some adjustments to this guy very simple since we already have our mask in place we double click on the layer thumbnail for that smart object pops us open into camera raw now i don't even care what the foreground looks like because i know it's not going to be visible so i can pull back on my highlights here i can pull back on my shadows maybe even not so much on the highlights i did i say shadows i meant exposure you know what i meant i'll pull back a little bit on either one of those i'm actually even going to pull back on haze because the d haze was for the foreground the d haze was not for the sky and you can see it even it added to that hard gradation that we had in the sky there so i'll pull back on those as well so maybe even a little bit on saturation to just push a little bit of blue and even warm it up a bit something right around there again i don't even care too much about what's happening over here because i know it's not going to be visible watch when we click ok it is going to update that layer and now we have a nicer smoother transition and gradation it's going to be bright over here no matter what that's that's going to be a fact of life we're never going to get rid of that but what we're trying to do is not make it bright white okay trying to introduce some of that natural color that was over on that side without negatively affecting this side but we also have a mask meaning i can take my brush tool set the foreground color to black i usually do it with a lower opacity 30 40 and then i can even paint over here if it did start to make that area too dark okay so that even helps even this whole out even this whole thing out even more and now i've got my foreground where i can go double click on that layer and maybe even add a little bit more dehaze to it maybe even add a little bit more whites to it which i couldn't do before because it would have destroyed all of that highlight detail over there i even pull back on the blacks a little bit a little bit more contrast click ok now i can update that foreground and it's independent of the sky so i have two of these layers essentially a highlight mask that's really controlling the bright highlights that i happen to have in this photo so let's take a look at what would be different on a portrait photo so we'll go ahead and open up this portrait photo i've gone through i've done my basic exposure to it let's go get out of the adjustment tool here i've done some basic exposure shadows highlights white blacks what i'm finding is as in from an overall exposure standpoint i like the exposure here i'm not crazy about how some of this gets really bright i have some of the brighter spots on her face some of the shadows but i can't i can't pull back because when i do that it to me makes the shadows too dark in some areas so knowing that and knowing that i have a highlight mask at my disposal in photoshop and a very complex one i can go photo edit in open as a smart object in photoshop once i get there i just go layer smart object new smart object via copy so now i have a separate one this is going to be the one for my highlight mask and then i go to my channels again there's an action in the description you can download that'll help you with this process a little bit give you a little bit a little bit more of a visual way to go it does include a little video with it but simple we command or control click on that rgb channel and then command option shift on the mac control alt shift on pc click once maybe click twice that's actually looking pretty good i just want it over here on the shoulder on the right and this right side of the face so that looks good go back to layers add that layer mask it automatically keeps everything intact and now i can adjust that top layer so just double click it that will take us back over into adobe camera raw now i can pull back a little bit on my exposure pull back a little bit on my highlights i don't like the way it's negatively affecting the side of the face i don't like the way some things get dark here but again all i'm keeping an eye on is the bright spots so i know that that's going to work so i click ok you can see it'll update that layer and now we have the best of both worlds that's before that's after and just like before if you wanted to use a brush to brush any of it out and bring some highlights back in you could do it you know i could brush a little bit of the highlight back into the shirt but not all of the way and what that gives is a very easy way to create a complex mask but still all of the same tools brushes and selections all the same tools that we could always use to modify that mask if we wanted to now in the beginning i had mentioned that this was a little bit of an offshoot on luminosity masking and i do believe luminosity masking is a more complex topic you don't always need that complexity but if that is something you wanted to explore more because you want more control over your photos i just want to let you know i do have a video on that topic and you can watch that one if you wanted to learn a little bit more about it

Channel: Matt Kloskowski

Views: 20,339

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Id: KwiKk94un2o

Length: 14min 43sec (883 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 02 2021