Hi, this is ManantialVE.
In this LumaFusion tutorial I’ll show you how to isolate and mask a range of tones in a video,
so they can be adjusted and color graded independently,
without affecting the rest of the image.
Tones refers to the levels of brightness in an image.
Shadows are the darker tones, highlights are the lighter tones
and midtones are the rest of the tones between them.
For example, in this image, the water stream tends towards the highlights,
the trees on the back tend towards the shadows and
the vegetation and rocks on the left side of the screen are in the midtones range.
Before we get into the details, let’s see the mask that isolates a range of tones in action.
When the mask is applied and brightness is adjusted,
only the tones in the range of the mask are affected.
In this case the rocks and vegetation on the left side of the screen will be affected by the changes
in brightness while the water stream and the trees in the back will remain mostly unaffected.
The areas included in the mask are pushed towards the highlights when brightness is increased
or towards the shadows when brightness is reduced.
Looking at the waveform, the middle area moves up when brightness is increased
and down when it is reduced.
The highlights and shadows at the top and bottom of the waveform remain unchanged.
Now let’s see how the mask is created.
We start with a new LumaFusion project already containing a grayscale gradient that is linear.
The gradient will be used to illustrate the effect of the mask being applied and adjusted,
and it’s not needed once you are familiar with how this method works.
Edit the clip containing the grayscale gradient.
Add the Light Luma Key preset. This will key out the highlights.
Let’s further adjust the preset by setting Roll Off and Erosion Distance to zero.
Keep the default value for Edge Blur Radius.
Now, make sure that you collapse the Light Luma Key preset before continuing,
otherwise the next step will override it.
Add a Dark Luma Key preset so it’s placed right after the Light Luma
Key preset that you’ve added in the previous step.
The Dark Luma Key preset will key out the shadows,
so now only the range of tones between the shadows and highlights is visible.
As before, set Roll Off and Erosion Distance to zero….
…and keep the default value for Edge Blur Radius.
The range of tones that are isolated can be adjusted.
The levels in the Light Luma Key preset control the right side of the range,
towards or away from the highlights.
The levels of the Dark Luma Key preset work in the same way to
control the left side of the range towards or away from the shadows.
You can define different tone ranges and save them as custom effect presets so you can reuse them.
Now that you have a good understanding of how this
method works, let’s see an end to end workflow example.
As we saw earlier, this effect can be used to selectively adjust brightness,
but it can also be used for color adjustments.
For this part of the tutorial we are going to use this video…
We are going to apply a mask that isolates the skin tones
so they can be adjusted separately while keeping the rest of the image unchanged.
Let’s start with a new LumaFusion project already containing 2 copies of the video in the timeline.
Edit the second copy.
As we did previously, add the Light Luma Key preset and set its values.
Now collapse the Light Luma Key preset…
…and add the Dark Luma Key preset, setting its values as we did earlier.
Next, adjust the range of the mask by setting the levels in both Luma Key presets
so it isolates the skin tones from the remaining higher or lower tones.
Scroll through the video to ensure that the mask works properly for every part of it.
Keep in mind that it doesn’t have to be perfect.
Exit back to the timeline. This is how the video looks with
the mask applied. [SHOW]
Move the clip that you just edited to the second track, just above the first copy of the video.
At this moment the mask in the second track and the video in the main track
have no color grading applied, so the image looks unchanged.
Edit the video on the second track containing the mask.
The next steps will affect only the areas included in the mask,
which in this case is mostly the face.
The goal is to give the face a more natural color.
Add the original preset.
Increase the Reds a bit.
Reduce the Blues.
Slightly reduce Gamma.
Finally increase Vibrance a bit.
Let’s compare how the video looks with and without the mask.
Exit back to the timeline.
This is how the video looks with the mask applied.
When using this method, you don’t have to stick to realistic colors.
Finally you could create masks for multiple different tone ranges of the same clip,
stack them together and then color grade them independently .
So this is it for this episode. If you liked this video,
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Thank you for watching. Stay safe, and I'll see you on the next one.