today I want to share with you details of a free luminosity masking panel
that's one of the best you'll find in fact it's so good
I used it extensively in my latest luminosity masking course the panel is
called interactive luminosity masks and it's very simple to use which makes it
so powerful you've got an option first off to create a luminosity mask or a
saturation mask we're going to look at a luminosity mask to start with and I'll
use this image that you see on screen to show you how you can make further
adjustments using luminosity masks so we'll start with a luminosity mask and
what I want to do is select the sky here so that I can actually reduce its
brightness very slightly to do that I can use the highlights mask so the
highlights target the highlights in the image you've got the mid-tone masks that
target mid-tones and shadow masks that target the darkest areas now there's
something else as well called a zone mask and we'll come to that later
but we'll go with the highlights mask to start with now as soon as I select that
what we've got is this curve here and this is what helps us control the
selection over in the main window you can see the highlights in the image as
shown as white and the darkest areas as shown as black the areas between the two
and the gray areas and they're transitions that help you make blending
easier now you can control this curve even further to actually select the
areas you want and you can do that with these buttons here personally though I
prefer to grab and drag the slider here so if I move this over to the right what
you can see is that we're selecting more of the shadow areas in the highlights
and that's actually shown with this curve not being quite as steep if I move
it over to the right we focus our attention onto the brightest areas in
the image now I'm going to set that to around here the mid area and what that
will let me do is it will target these areas of the sky that you
be white and it will allow me to just darken them that little bit and I'll
show you how I'll do that in a moment first of all we have to decide what is
it that we want to create we can use the mash to create a selection or channel or
we can pick one of three adjustments that are commonly used with luminosity
must and those are the curves levels or the hue and saturation layer now I'm
going to create a channel out of this because I want to save it in case I need
to go back to it and use it again in the future
I click the channels option and now I can name my new channel for this I'm
going to call it bright sky and that's just a reminder to me that it selects
the bright areas in the sky so that's my channel actually create it if I go over
to the channels window you can see the channel here bright sky that I've just
created and if I click it you can see what it is I'm now going to add the
curves adjustment and they'll use that now to darken the image now as I've done
that you can see the saturation increase as well as reducing the brightest areas
the problem is it's made that change across the entire image and I don't
really want that so what I'm going to do is select my mask here and I'm going to
invert it to hide the effect I can now go back to the channel that I created
called bright sky and I can load that here as a selection now once I've got
that as a selection I can actually pick my mask again and I can with a brush
tool paint over the sky now I'm just going to use a large brush tool here so
I don't have to do many brush strokes and I'm just painting in the area of the
sky that I want to actually effect
now it's taking a little bit of time to update because I'm using such a wide
brush and I'm painting through the selection that we created now what the
selection is doing is it's restricting my brush strokes through only painting
it to the highlights so let's say that's in a selection for the sky I'm just
going to reduce the brushstroke size and I'm now going to paint just onto the
foreground here now I just get rid of my selection and you can see the difference
if I turn the layer off if I look at the mus that I've created I'll hold down alt
on my keyboard and click the mask you can see that I've painted into the areas
where I want the effect to be seen and because I've been painting through the
selection that we created using the luminosity mask tool it looks a little
bit like the channel that we created before if the effects a little bit too
strong you can always reduce the opacity on the layer let's now look at actual
lightening the rocks which are a little bit too dark in this example and again
I'll use the interactive luminosity mask tool so I come up to my tool I'll select
the luminosity masks and this time I'm going to select the shadows so
immediately you can see that I'm no targeting the darkest areas in my image
and again I can control it using this option here to feather the effect now I
don't want to affect just the darkest areas so I won't keep the feathering low
I'll actually move the feathering up so that we've got a reasonable area and
I'll use the paintbrush technique that I used before again so again I'm just
going to save this note as a channel and I'll call this dark rocks
where as it did before so we'll use the curves again
and this time I'm going to use the curve to lighten the rocks again it's
affecting the entire image so I'll select the the mask I'll invert it to
hide the effect I'll go back to pick my dark rock Channel I'll load that as a
selection back to the layers window select the mask that's all black at the
moment and now I'm going to paint in the area of the rocks using the brush tool
with white paint as I'm painting the effect that we created with the
adjustment is actually starting to be seen in the rocks
now I'm not painting a big heavy adjustment here I want to keep this
looking quite natural I'll clear the selection so that you can see what I'm
doing you can of course hide the selection while you're painting but at
the moment I'm just trying to demonstrate some of the techniques and
now my lightening of the rocks has been completed in just the area where the
rocks are very dark and you could of course go on and target areas like the
lighthouse or the Sun and really make a difference on this image if I look at
the mask I've created there you can see it and you can target things much more
precisely than I am doing here if you want to make the effect stronger you can
do but if you make it too strong be careful because it can start to look
unnatural if you think it's too strong just reduce your opacity slightly let's
now look at using a saturation mask and we'll target the sky and really go to
town and boost the saturation in those areas again the interactive luminosity
mask tool I'm going to create a saturation mask this time and to show
you how it works I'll use the zoom mask now it's very
very similar to you using the other masking tools such as
highlights mid-tones and shadows but we can pick zones of brightness or zones of
saturation in the image and we can do that using this slider so as I move the
slider left and right what you can see is this curve moves left and right and
you can use these feather controls here to determine how precise the selection
is that you're going to make now all you need to remember is the light areas are
where the selection is the dark areas are where the selections being hidden so
what I can do is move this adjustment now to target the areas of the sky that
I want to target and enhance the saturation with once I'm happy I'll save
that as a channel again and we'll call it boost saturation I'll now add a hue
and saturation adjustment layer and a will target the yellows in the sky and
I'll use the picker tool just to pick out the areas that I'm really interested
in and you can see the selection down here in the tool I can note boost the
saturation quite strongly in those areas I'll again invert my mask to hide the
effect I got back to the channels window select a boost saturation channel and
load it as a selection and again I'll paint in the areas that I want to
enhance the saturation effect so I'll use a big paintbrush and I'll just paint
over the sky
and I'll also Walter in the foreground here and a
little as well
action and our the mask you can see the areas I've
painted in to enhance the saturation I turn that off you can see the subtle
difference and of course you can enhance the adjustments still further if you
want it to so if I select all three of those layers now I can place them into a
folder and turn that off and on so you can see the adjustment difference so
interactive luminosity masking panel is really useful and it's free which is the
great thing about it if you're interested I'll put the link in the
information below as well as the link to the luminosity masking course that I use
this in one other thing that I would like to draw your attention to though is
this button here buy me a cookie the author of this panel hasn't asked for
any money in payment of this if you like it you can use that button to donate a
small sum term now I have nothing at all to do with this panel I just think it's
a really great tool I'm very pleased that the author created it I hope you
found this useful I'm Robin Whalley you've been watching
lenscraft I'll see you next time for another video