What the Heck are Luminosity Masks

so I'm calling this class today what the heck are luminosity masks primarily because this is exactly what went through my mind a couple of years ago and I started seeing people talking about them you know in photo discussion groups and you know even just on Facebook and photo groups and things like that and I'm like what the heck is this I need to find out what these things are and so I did a lot of research learned how to create luminosity masks and I want to share some of that basic information with you guys today this is by no means my top level advanced luminosity masking class that's a separate event but what I hope to do today is get you guys up to speed on some of the concepts here so my overview today is to really talk about one fundamental concept in Photoshop and that's layer masks layer masks are really really useful and luminosity masks are a form of layer masks so we need to learn about layer masks just a little bit first so I can show you how they work and then I will talk about creating the manasa T masks and what you can do with them so let's start off with just getting an idea and getting our feet wet with just what a layer mask is so you understand them the fundament photoshop and this is one of those things that you're not going to be able to do you can do some of these things in lightroom but but this is one of those photoshop things and it's one of the tools in Photoshop but if you learn one thing in Photoshop learning to do layers and layer masking would be right up there the top of my list because they've become very handy in all kinds of different different applications and luminosity masking is just just one of those applications so I want to show you how to add a layer mask to your image and then work with those layer masks just briefly so you can understand the fundamental concept here so what I'm going to do is I'm going to go over into Photoshop where I've got an image open and what you want to do is if you're in Photoshop at home or at work wherever it might be the first thing you're going to want to make sure is that for any of these operations you're going to want to have a couple of panels open and visible to work within your workspace and you can customize your workspace and Photoshop however you want but for me the ones that I like to make sure that I've got are on the right-hand side here I've got three panels that are that are always going to be open for me and that's the adjustments panel here at the top the properties panel in the middle and at the bottom I've got the layers panel and this layers panel is is critical this is where you can work with layers and layer masks now if you want to show those panels what you need to do is just go over to the window menu and you can choose any of those panels so make sure that there's a little checkbox next to the particular panels of interest and then you can arrange them however you'd like on the left-hand side I've got some panels open that are useful for working with luminosity masks which I'll show you in a little bit but those panels are going to be very important those are the the channels panel I've got down here at the bottom and then I've got my actions panel here because I'm going to use those later so I'm going to collapse my actions panel by double clicking on it and just keep this channels panel open so you can see that there's these these channels over here red green and blue and the composite this is what you need to have visible when you want to work with luminosity masks as we're going to see but for right now let me just show you the concept of a layer mask real quickly they apply to different kinds of layers so I've got this image open and the the nice thing about Photoshop is that by working in a layer you can not damage pixels on your original image so I've got this background layer which is what happens when you open up a photo into Photoshop say from Lightroom or any other editor and what I'm going to do is I'm going to add a layer to this image so I'm just going to go down on the bottom of the layers panel my mouse is over here on the bottom right side I'm going to go down to the very bottom of the layers panel I'm just going to click this little page curl thing here and that's new layer and this creates what's called a pixel layer and I can take my paintbrush in my pixel layer hit B on my keyboard and I can scribble on my image do some graffiti the great thing about a layer though is because I've done this I haven't touched the pixels in my original image so I've protected them so that's that's a that's a basic idea of a layer now let me show you what a layer mask does now let's say I wanted to erase some of the pixels in this layer one here the one way I could do it would be to grab the eraser tool and just erase them but if I do that I get rid of those pixels in this pixel layer just like I would be getting rid of pixels in any other image layer and that's destructive so I'm going to add a layer mask to this to this layer by clicking this little rectangle with a hole cut out of it down the bottom of the layers panel it's right here okay and it says add layer mask and what I want you to see is that it added a mask it's got its own little thumbnail it's white and when I'm working in the layer mask you're going to see little corners on it so I can click between the pixel layer itself and the layer mask now in the layer mask you can show or hide what's in its associated pixel layer or as we'll see adjustment layer so check this out if I go to the brush and just use black as my foreground color I paint into this layer mask and reveal what's underneath just like I will be erasing but you'll notice that nothing happened to the pixels in the Associated pixel layer if I switch back the color to white so I'm going to go over here to the left hand side now I'm all the way on the left side where the color palette is and I'm going to click the arrows to switch to the white foreground color and I paint back in but notice that when I'm painting in areas that aren't covered in pixels nothing happens so I can just fill this in so at a fundamental sense what layer masks let us do is show or hide the effect or the pixels in their Associated layer and you can do this without damaging what's in within the pixel layer so it's truly a useful tool black erases white shows and if you do somewhere in between say I set the opacity of my brush to 50% or even 10% you see I can erase or paint em at different opacities build it up now one practical use of this is to of layer masking is to apply selective effects that are coupled to what are called adjustment layers so let's do the next real basic step I'm going to throw away this this layer here I'm just going to click on the layer thumbnail and hit the trashcan down at the bottom right corner of my screen delete layer boom it's gone and now instead of adding a pixel layer we're going to add what's called an adjustment layer this is where things get really quite cool because adjustment layers are all the same tools that you'd have up here in your adjustments tool panel in this menu so say curves but we do them in in a non-destructive adjustment layer so I'm going to click the curves adjustment layer and now in my properties window you see that there is the curves tool this is the same curves tool that you're used to using but it's now in this properties and there's this layer called curves one applied to my image to my layers panel excuse me so I can make a curves adjustment and as you notice this affects the entire image so the next step would be to say alright I can localize this curves adjustment by simply using a layer mask on the adjustment layer so let me show you how that works I'm going to add a layer mask but instead of adding the default white show everything layer mask I'm going to flip it I'm going to add a black layer mask to hide everything and the way you do that is to hold down the Alt key or the option key on your keyboard while clicking add layer mask and so now I added a black mask that hides everything and I'll take my brush B set it to white set the opacity it's something other than 100% and now I can just paint in is effect where I want it so let's just say I wanted to lighten up this this area so this is pretty cool but I still haven't talked about luminosity masks so let's call me let me go go one step further okay let's just say that I wanted to adjust the the sky here that would be incredibly difficult so let me just go in let me erase my own delete this curves layer or the mask excuse me now let's just say I want to paint in just on that red sky so I'm going to hit my black mass so alt click the add layer mask and now I'm going to take my brush and Trust try to paint this in okay so the idea here is that if I just try to use my brush what you might find is that depending on your adjustment it's kind of hard to brush in like just hit those areas so what we want to do is come up with a technique that allows us to better target those those areas and that's where luminosity masking is come come handy so instead of just being stuck with just a brush to make selections we're going to make masks that are based on the tone ranges in our image so let me go back here for a second and talk about luminosity masks now okay the challenge with masking is always getting the selection right it can be a real trick to get good selections so what luminosity masks allow us to do we can produce grayscale images based on the pixels in our master image in the original photo and those pixels are different shades of black and white different shades of gray depending on the tone that they correspond to so remember white pixels will always be selected in a mask they will be shown black pixels are hidden so luminosity masks are going to be grayscale representations of our image based on tone and what's beautiful about them is that they allow us to make precise feathered selections that correspond to those different tones and they can be combined with all kinds of different selection tools we can use them as by themselves on the entire image we can even use them to make selections to restrict the brush so all of these things are our fancy techniques the better you get with Photoshop you can start playing with those techniques so what we want to do is discover how to create luminosity masks real simple and I'll show you the easy way to do it okay the the fundamental technique here okay and this is why you need Photoshop to do this is that we're going to use selections from those channels that I showed you earlier we're going to make a selection and then we're going to do calculations on that selection so that it corresponds to a particular tone range and then we save them over in those that channels palette that I showed you so the channels panel is kind of like your library and it stores the luminosity masks or anything else that you make layer masks and saves them and then when you're ready to use them you can load that particular channel as a selection and use it to generate a layer mask over on the layer side so let me show you that real quick go back to photoshop let's get rid of this curves one layer and let me let me show you how you could make a luminosity mask the simplest way to make a luminosity mask is to come over to the channels menu so you've got to have the channels visible and when you get over to the the channels what you're going to do is you're going to go over to the RGB channel here and you're going to hold down the control key or the command key depending on if you're a Windows or Mac user and when you do that I want you to look at that little pointer finger so you get that little square okay that little dash square I'm going to click it and it loads the RGB channel as a selection and then I'm going to come down here to the to the bottom of the channels window and it's the same little icon as the layer mask icon is that square with a hole in it so save selection as a channel and it does is called alpha-1 and you'll notice that this alpha one channel is just a grayscale image and if I do the same thing again if I select this all and then if I select the inverse and save that as a channel we get this alpha 2 now now look at these two these two grayscale images this is the standard black and white if I just hit desaturate this is what my image would look like and down here is the inverse of that you'll notice that on this image all the dark stuff is black and all the lights are light and everything else at the mid toner in between is some other shade of grey the inverse all the darks are white and all the light tones are black what does that mean it means if you use one of these and load this as a layer mask it's going to be matched perfectly to your image because it's identical pixels but what is selected in this mask this alpha one are the light tones and what's selected in this mask are the dark tones and the concept of luminosity masks is to go ahead and make iterative selections of these different tone ranges and and the reality is that it can be a little bit complicated but let me just show you what how you would use this let's say that this alpha one channel which is really my light tones I can apply that to a a layer so I'm going to do the same curves adjustment layer that I did before and now I'm going to go over to my channels command click now that's the same thing that I did before 2 on the RGB but now what I'm going to do is I'm going to eat a command or control click on the channel that I'm interested in and that loads this as a selection you see those marching ants with it loaded as a selection I can go over here to the curves layer and click add layer mask and looking here now we have this this mask this grayscale mask loaded on to this curves channel so when I do my curve adjustment I'm only adjusting those light tones and I can do this with any adjustment layer tool that I want the simplest being brightness/contrast you know you can do it with curves you can do it with color color casts you can do levels whatever you want so the next step then is to make a whole series of luminosity masks so let me go and and talk about before we do that let me just talk about when you would want to use luminosity masks on your image okay your going to use luminosity masks these are most of the time are going to be fairly subtle adjustments they're very powerful but they're subtle adjustments we're going to use them when you want to target some kind of color or contrast or brightness darkness adjustment to a particular tone range anytime you've got a lot of complex mid-tone detail those are a good time to use luminosity masks you can really bring those tones apart and get contrast in those mid-tones you can also work on images where you want to just pop a very subtle color adjustment to a sky you know you want to saturate just highlights or protect highlights and just saturate say mid-tones or shadows over in Lightroom you know you can you can do things with the brush you can adjust saturation but you can't just saturate highlights you can't protect highlights and just saturate say the shadows you can do curves you can do all these tools but you cannot target those color adjustments to tone ranges and the brush can get really tricky to use so luminosity masks make this much simpler in terms of how you can target those adjustments I also like to use luminosity masks when I'm blending in HDR tone mapping textures you know strong structure or even sharpening effects it softens them and makes them appear more natural so I showed you that you could make luminosity masks by hand but the reality is is that nobody does that I mean unless you're just into punishment the easy way to do luminosity masks is to use actions okay because creating in some cases twenty twenty-five different masks that each correspond the different tones can be a real real challenge if you had to do it from scratch every single time and nobody can remember it so we're going to use actions and I've got some actions available I have three actions to generate luminosity masks that are in my ebook and that's available on my website so you can download you can install those actions there's instructions on how to do it and I'll show you how to actually use them here in just a moment but these are going to create three series of luminosity masks okay something called the standard series something called zone masks and something called expanded mid-tones so let's go in and do that go back to photoshop alright so I'm in Photoshop and what we're going to do now is I'm going to get rid of this let's go to a different image let's go to this edge and what you're going to do is you're going to make sure that your actions panel is open and if you have my actions from my ebooks they're in a folder called Odell luminosity mess so I'm going to open that folder just expand this out and there's a series of actions here that will create luminosity masks the trick when you start is to make sure that your bottom boat your image layer or the background layer depending on how you've brought your image in is is selected and visible so a luminosity mask is always going to be generated from the active layer so you want to make sure that you've got the image selected and I'm just going to go over to where it says generate luminosity masks highlight it by clicking it and then just press play and now what you can see on my channels is I've generated an entire series of luminosity masks each one has its own name that I bet I've given it so here's that light mask that we generated before this was just that RGB selection here's the darks but then we have a whole bunch of other ones we have a whole series of lights lights one highlights one highlights two whites and you'll notice that each of these masks or each of these channel selections these grayscale images they get they get progressively darker so they're only pulling out the the brighter tones so this highlights one is brighter than lights one this highlights two is even brighter and the whites are the brightest tones in this particular image same with the darks we go to the dark and then the darks one shadows one shadows two and then finally down here in black and then there's a mask for mid-tones right here so these are cool I can also generate a whole round of additional masks and these additional masks are constructed by calculating from this original series so if you're going to use my actions from from my ebook the first thing you always want to do is is run that generate luminosity mask action so that you have the base set the standard masks so I'm going to click generate zone masks and it's going to give me this warning hey hey don't forget you need to make sure that you've already made luminosity masks so I already done that so I'm going to click continue and here we get a completely different set of even more narrow targeted masks in a sense these are similar to the zone system but not identical so we've got these zones zone zero being the black the darkest tone and then here is zone 1 zone 2 zone 3 progressively brighter as we work through these now notice that these are very narrow in fact some of these are quite black in places so these are very very narrow tone selections and we've used those when you're really just trying to target and separate tones on color or texture or brightness values that are very subtle and then the third one which I think is the most interesting one of them all is the one I like to use the most it's called the expanded mid-tones and again it's going to give you this warning just go ahead and click continue if you've already made your standard series of masks these mid-tones um here's the same mid-tones as we had before and then you've got an expanded mid-tones one and even stronger mid-tones too now what I love about these is that these are always selecting the middle values they're going to protect the darks and the bright so you can make adjustments that that don't affect your blacks or your shadows and your extreme highlights you're only operating in the in the middle there so that's the mechanism of creating luminosity masks it's not hard to do when you have these actions and the masks in my actions are all using this advanced technique called calculations so there are 16-bit Channel masks and and they're there and they can be saved with your image I I don't recommend saving them with your image they just make a lot of space the cool thing is is that once you have these actions you can regenerate you can delete them you can regenerate them at any time get your luminosity masks back so you don't have to save them with your with your Photoshop file necessarily okay so now that the real reason why you came here is what the heck are you going to do with these luminosity masks now that you've made them I want to give you a couple of quick examples there's a lot more detailed examples in my ebook but we can adjust tone ranges using either the curves or brightness contrast and color and then we can also use them as a selection tool for any kind of layer mask that we want so I'm going to show you some examples of both of those operations go back to photoshop let me just show you a real simple operation first for a simple operation like on this image which is kind of flat you might want to just adjust the initial tone values so what I'm going to do is I'm going to grab the the lights one channel and I'm going to hold down ctrl or command and click on it makes a selection and then I'm going to add a brightness contrast adjustment layer this is the easiest one to use so you can just make things brighter or you can make them darker and you can adjust contrast so I want to brighten up just that sky a little bit and I can do the same thing for my dark so I'm going to go down to the ARC's one ctrl or command click the darks one channel thumbnail click brightness/contrast adjustment and you can make those kinds of adjustments so that's interesting but that's not really exciting so what else can I do well I can also make color adjustments so one of the things I might want to do is really bring in some color to these subtle highlights so I'm going to I'm going to go up here and select the highlights one channel and I'm going to add a vibrance adjustment layer which gives me vibrance and saturation now it doesn't look like I did much here okay but the reality is is that I was making a very strong adjustment that's been targeted to this particular mask so let's let's show you what happens if I were to not have used the mask oops excuse me I'm going to hide the mask if you hold shift and click the thumbnail okay so there's my thermonuclear Sky if I was just using saturation but by using the mask I am targeting that adjustment to just those those highlight values so that sky so that's one example for where you might want to use it you might want to use it to tone down something that got oversaturated in the bright tones in your master so you can go both ways with that another really easy adjustment to do is to work with the mid-tones mask and do a mid-tones contrast adjustment using either the curves or the or the contrast brightness contrast so I'm going to go down to my mid-tones mask and I'm going to ctrl click on it now when you click on some of these masks that are mostly gray you've hit this little warning from Photoshop don't worry about it what it's really telling is that you have a selection but you don't see any marching ants running around on your image I'm going to click OK and I'm going to hit curves and I'm just going to do an extreme curve there we go and once again notice that if I had not used this mask I would have gotten something like this so we'd have a tool like curves which is kind of a a real beast to use because it's so strong a small curve adjustment usually ends up being way too strong it can really easily get out of hand but here I'm able to target that adjustment to just the mid-tones or again I could select any any of them that I wanted to I have this other image and I'm going to make some luminosity masks here to show you how you can adjust the color cast here's a kind of image where you might want to warm up the the image and one of the things you can do is you know you can go into like levels or curves for example and I could do an auto curve it kind of warms things up gets it can get rid of color cast those rocks are normally red but when it does it it kind of gets rid of my blue haze back here and in in some cases in landscapes in particular your your bluish your blue haze is actually kind of something that gives a little depth to your image so I can apply this to a luminosity mask and protect those highlights so I'm just going to click dark going to going to go over to the darks in the channels control click and then add the mask so now you can see that I've got a color correction just to those dark tones and I get that kind of nice red blue color complementary color contrast that is so nice in landscapes but you can also do this with things like photo filters so for example you may want to add a warming filter will do a nice little 81 warming filter and I'm going to only add that to the darker parts so I'm going to go down to here and choose darks one and control click come back over to my adjustment layer click the add mask button and you can see now that I'm just warming this up these adjustments themselves do not look massively different you know they're pretty subtle but that's what's good about them these are the kinds of refinements that you're using a small scalpel to make not a you know axe so we're going through and this is you know your 800 grit sandpaper kind of adjustment not the course adjustments that you could make with this because trying to do this would say a white balance adjustment in Lightroom I would be making a global adjustment that'd be really hard or I'd be trying to use the brush and getting it to blend in naturally I'm never going to be able to make a selection with a brush that looks quite as nice as as this there's the mask and the cool thing here too to keep in mind is that you're not stuck on any one mask so if I don't like the way this one looks I can come over here to the mask click on it click the trashcan it gets rid of it and do it again with just a different different mask so maybe I wanted to use the darks one instead there okay last couple things I want to show one of the things I like to do is use the masks to restrict things like HDR tone mapping or sharpening effects so I'm going to generate the expanded mid-tones on this image okay and what I'm going to do is I want to do a high-pass sharpening so in order for me to do a high-pass sharpening I need to have a rasterized layer so what I'm going to do is I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to make a stamped layer composite of all three of these layers so I have a pixel layer to work with for my high pass now that's a complicated set of keyboard shortcuts but it's there it's it's ctrl alt shift E and I've actually got this as an action composite layer in my action set that comes with my ebook if you're if not good at remembering if you're not good at remembering keyboard shortcuts but that keyboard shortcut again is is ctrl alt shift e the one that everybody can remember and it's made this layer and now I can do a high-pass filter so I'm just going to do a nice one pixel high-pass or 0.8 pixel radius high-pass filter here it is it's in overlay mode and now I'm going to apply one of my mid-tones I'm going to use this mid-tones one control click and add the mask what that's going to do is it's going to protect the darkest shadows and the brightest light from from being over sharpened we can zoom in on here at 100% maybe we go to 200% really see the effect of the high pass again subtle effects that's what Photoshop is for it's about making your image better than what you could have gotten out of just Lightroom itself or whatever other raw editor you might have had so if you have let's say Lightroom sharpening is with the detail panel you can set one setting you can use the brush but that's about it in Photoshop I can do sharpening on a separate layer apply either brush with the mask or use a luminosity mask to target the areas that I want to to be sharpened the most the last thing I want to show you before we end is just this idea of what do you do if you want to target different tones but you don't want to do it globally go back to this first image that we had and I'm going to generate the luminosity masks and let's just say I want to target the bright tones but only the bright tones in the sky okay so I'm going to go to I'm going to add an adjustment I'm going to add a curves layer and I what I want to do is I want to darken this okay you can see how that might be a real pain to kind of brush in if I'm trying to darken it so I'm going to add a curves layer and my curves layer is going to be I'm going to leave it alone for right now and I'm going to do a little trick I'm going to put this into multiply blending mode well that darkens everything and now what I'm going to do is I'm going to do the same thing that we had in the in the beginning where I used the mask but I've generated a black mask so I'm going to hold down alt and click the mask button okay so I get this black mask and and now I'm going to go over to my luminosity masks and I'm going to look for the one that I want to target here it is highlights one now if I apply this mask on highlights one you'll notice it's going to affect my ocean down here the waves as well as the sky so I'm just going to going to ctrl or command click it and I get my marching ants now I'm going to use the brush tool be with white just like I showed you in the beginning I select the curves one mask this black thing here's my brush I'm going to set it to 100% and I'm just going to paint in right where I want it when I'm done I hit ctrl D to deselect so I'm not in my selection anymore and let's take a look at this mask so I'm going to hold down alt and click the mask and you can see that I was able to use my brush and just pull out that portion of the luminosity mask that was interesting to me and if I don't like it I can always just go in and redo it or erase it or use that so the two different ways you can use luminosity masks are as they are just by selecting them and applying them to your layer so you get this entire image or by adding a mask a black mask to your layer first and then selecting a luminosity mask and using it to restrict your brush while you paint into the layer mask and with a little bit of practice you'll get pretty good at it okay so now let's take a look at how this ended up so you see how I just toned down that sky a little bit when I toggle was on or off so it's really useful for those times where you just need to to burn in something and just target that bright pixels or dark pixels or whatever you know whatever tone you want

Channel: Jason Odell

Views: 23,520

Keywords: photography, Adobe Photoshop, luminosity masks

Id: JHMwem1wNSE

Length: 42min 31sec (2551 seconds)

Published: Fri May 19 2017