Hello and welcome to this episode of
Denny's tips where you're going to learn
about luminosity masking. One of my
favorite photoshop techniques, luminosity
masking lets you make a layer visible
according to the brightness value of
your photo. For example you can brighten
your photo and then apply the luminosity
masking so that it doesn't overexpose
the areas that are already bright to
begin with.
You can also apply color grading effects
to different tonal areas like just the
shadows or just the highlights. You can do
stuff like HDR tone mapping and there's
a lot more you can do. Luminosity
masking is one of the oldest and most useful
retouching techniques. I've been teaching
this since the beginning of my first
photoshop website which was over 12
years ago and I've seen others teaching
at meeting earlier over 15 years ago but
despite it being old, it still being used
today and pretty much the same way. In
this photoshop tutorial we'll learn the two most
useful and common that this for the
luminosity masking. So if you're ready,
let's get started.
There's two ways to do luminosity
masking in Photoshop, one is with a layer
mask and the other is with the layer style,
there's pros and cons but I'll
start with the layer mask method. First,
as an example, I'm gonna add a brightness
contrast adjustment layer and then bump
up the brightness. You can now see that
the image is brighter, but the inside of
the building is way overexposed. Using
luminosity masking, we can fix this by
making the layer only affect the shadows.
Here's how to do it; first make sure that
the layer mask is selected in your
layers panel then go to "Image" -> "Apply
Image", this tool lets you place any layer
into your current layer or layer mask. It
also gives you a lot of options, so for
example you can choose the layer. You can
choose the channel, you can choose
whether to invert the layer or not. Set
the blending mode and a lot more. It's
quite powerful but for this image we're
just going to leave the layer set to
merge and I will enable the "Invert"
option and the blending mode should be
set to either multiply or normal and
then when you're ready click "OK". Our
image looks much better but what exactly
happened? Look in the layers panel you
can see that we now have an inverted
copy of the image in layer mask, you can
also hold the "alt or option" key and
click on the layer mask thumbnail to
preview how it looks. So, here we can see
that this brightness contrast layer is
only being shown in the white areas here
which are the dark spots in the photo and in
city building which originally was
overexposed, it's now being masked out and
it looks normal again.
So, this is a great way to selectively
pick the tonal areas that your layer should
appear in, you can also go further and
start manipulating the layer mass. For
example, if we use the levels tool by
pressing ctrl or command L we can make
the layer mask brighter or darker, we can
increase the contrast. Lift the blacks, drop
the whites.. It's quite flexible.
Another thing you can do is to blur the
layer mask, if we look at the area here
you can see that the contrast is a bit
low, but we can blur it to increase the
clarity. To do this, go to "Filter" -> "Blur" ->
"Gaussian Blur", if you use a small setting
like three pixel, it will sharpen the edges for
better results. If you use a large number
like 20 pixels, it will increase the clarity
like this, but if you do this
be careful of halos that can appear
between light and dark areas. For example,
look at the roof here, you can see that
there's a slight glow around it. For this
image, it's not really that noticeable
but it's something that you need to be
careful of, whenever you're doing this. So,
that was the first method to use. The
luminosity masking, here's how it looks
like before and after. You can also use
it with other layer such as the vibrance or
saturation layer, the color lookup layer
and more. But, there are also layers that
you don't need to use it for such as the
color balance and the tone curve. I will
explain more about that later but first
let's learn the second method of
luminosity masking. So most people use
the first method I just saw because it's
the most widely taught, but there's more
efficient ways to luminosity masks and
instead of using a layer mask, you can
use a layer style instead. The layer
style method is the one that you should
be using whenever you can.
Anyways, let me show you how it's done
I'm going to delete this layer mask
because we don't need it anymore. And to
apply luminosity masking to this
layer just right click on the layer and
then go to "Blending Options" here in the Blend If
setting you can change the tonal
areas where the layers visible, so if I
drag the white inputs slider towards the left,
the layer will only be visible in this
tonal ranges, and as I adjust, you can see
the bright areas being restored but if
we look at the results, the transition
is really sharp and get a lot of ugly
art effects.
There's a trick to smooth itself
and it took me years before I found out
about this, if you hold the "Alt or Option"
key, the slider was split in half and you
can fade it out like this. If you want
really smooth results you can even drag
the sliders all the way to both ends like
this, by the way there's two bars here
which you can adjust basically it's like
this - the top layer will tell Photoshop
to show this layer if the layer is within
these tonal ranges, the bottom one will
tell Photoshop to show the layer if the
underlying layer is within these total
ranges you can just trial both to see
which one works better but a lot of
times it doesn't really matter which one
you use,
you'll still be able to get good results
from both. Okay so we're done with the
luminosity mask, here's how it looks like
before and after.
Now even though the layer style is more
efficient, you can't manipulate the mask like
you can with an actual layer mask so you
can't do things like apply a gaussian
blur or UC levels to on the layer mask
but it's more efficient and it's lighter
way.
There are also times when you don't even
need to use luminosity masking, for
example to color balance adjustment
already let's you select different tonal
ranges so let's say you want to tint the
shadows blue just select shadows from the
drop-down menu and do it from there. It's
much more efficient than creating your
own luminosity masks, same with the
curves adjustment. It already let you
pick which tonal areas you want to
adjust, so if you don't want your
adjustment to show up in the highlights,
then just don't make any changes to your
highlights.
Luminosity masking is also built into
some filter - select the "smart sharpen
filter" and typically I'll see people use
luminosity masking with a sharpened
layer. Again, if the built-in luminosity
masking is good enough, there's no need to
do it yourself. Anyways, that's how you do
luminosity masking in Photoshop. There are
some photoshop plugins for luminosity
masking but I find that it's something
that's already easy and fast to do. In
fact, I would say that in most situations
it's actually faster to do it by
yourself than it is to use a plug-in. The
only time I would recommend those
plugins is if you're doing something
complicated with many layers such as HDR
tone mapping. By the way, if you're
interested in HDR tone mapping you can
download my set of photoshop actions
which will let you tone map multiple
exposures in just a couple clicks. You
don't need to pay for it because
the free version is sufficient for most
people's needs and if you're interested,
you can find a download link in the
video description.
Hey guys thanks for watching this video
luminosity masking is one of my favorite
techniques and you can do so much with
it. So, I encourage you to experiment and
try different ways of using it. Also if
you liked this video, you might like my
other video on how to use the tone chart
in Photoshop. Basically, that video will
show you how to use the curves
adjustment in more understandable and
easier way.
So if you're interested, click on the
video to watch it. Anyways, thanks for
watching guys! If you liked the video
please subscribe to my channel. I hope
you guys have an awesome day and I'll
catch you guys next week.