Luminosity Masks Photoshop Actions ##TOP## Download

Over the years I have been asked a lot of questions about how I manage to get so much detail out of the highlights on my film scans, particularly color negatives. A lot of people have also been asking how I correct the colors in my scans. I touched on the basics of those topics on an earlier post, so if you haven't already read my blog post on Scanning and Editing Color Negative Film make sure to check it out. This post will elaborate on the topic of luminosity masks, and how I use them for both color negative and slide film. At the end of this post, you will also find a downloadable Photoshop action that will easily create luminosity curves layers for both the highlights and the shadows so you can try it yourself. (Don't worry, I won't be offended if you scroll to the bottom to get that action now) Before we get started, I will say that this is not necessarily the only or the right way to make luminosity adjustments. This is just an overview of my workflow and a process that has worked well for me. These same ideas will also help with your digital images so I hope everyone learns something!

On the image above we're going to look at a type of scene that I commonly get questions about: shooting right into the sun and still having the sun and foreground nicely exposed. First of all, there's a lot of magic happening in the color negative films like Kodak Ektar and Portra, especially the latter. The dynamic range is outright insane on these films, being able to capture all the detail from the foreground to the disc of the sun. The problem is that once you scan an image that contrasty in, it will look very flat if you try to maintain details in all areas of the image. You still don't want to clip any of the highlights while scanning because we want to have more precise control over that in a program like Photoshop. Luminosity masks will give us the edge we need to adjust areas of the image based on their brightness, or luminosity. This way we can bring up the foreground brightness and contrast while only barely touching the area around the sun in a way that is subtle and creates no halo effects.

Luminosity Masks Photoshop Actions Download

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Ok, so what the heck are luminosity masks anyway? I had the chance to visit the gallery of well-known large format landscape photographer Michael Fatali several years ago. He's one of the few who still projects his images onto massive sheets of cibachrome paper and makes real darkroom prints from color transparencies. It's a shame to admit that I have come into the game of film photography too late to be able to master the art of cibachrome printing. There's only a few people left that have purchased the last of the paper, and even they have just a few years' supply left. Anyway, when talking about his printing technique Fatali mentioned that he makes multiple exposures of a color image on black and white film as well. He will then line these black and white negative images up perfectly with the original positive slide, essentially creating a luminosity mask in a traditional darkroom environment. That negative image blocks the light from the brightest part of the slide and allows light through the darker areas, essentially allowing him to raise the brightness of just the shadows. Absolutely brilliant! We are going to accomplish the same task in Photoshop with just a few presses on the keyboard.

As far as highlights go, slides don't typically need a whole lot of adjustment here. I just brighten the image up until it almost clips and make very small adjustments to colors and contrast. That's pretty much it for my luminosity mask adjustments. If I see a particular part of an image that needs extra adjustment I may mask out the rest of a new layer with the paint brush or gradient tools. You can even get creative with your luminosity adjustments, using them to apply hue/sat layers only to shadows or highlights or any adjustment you could really imagine. Of course luminosity masks aren't the only part of correcting the color and contrast, but they are one more tool you can use to get you closer.

You may ask why I would use luminosity masks to correct color instead of a global curves layer. My response is that it gives me just that little bit of extra control over the image outcome and doesn't take a whole lot of effort. I'm also using medium and large format film so I tend to already be very picky with the images I expose, might as well put all the effort into each image that you can. Being able to remove unwanted red casts from the shadows while still leaving pleasant film tones in the highlights is a very desirable feature to me. You have any other questions for me regarding luminosity masks? Feel free to leave a comment and don't forget to download the easy Photoshop action below!

I will explain in detail what luminosity masks are and how to use them to improve your photography. By working with luminosity masks, you will be able to express your vision in your images in the most accurate and compelling way, whether you work with color photography or with black and white photography.

I am also offering together with this complete guide to luminosity masks a FREE advanced luminosity masks action, the 16-bit 7-Level (en)Visionography LumMasks Action, that you can download and use to create amazing images. This way, you can immediately put into practice the knowledge you will get from this guide. Keep reading to find out how to get the luminosity masks action.

In short, luminosity masks are a technique in digital editing where you create selections based on the brightness values of an image. They are used to target specific tonal ranges in an image for precise adjustments to brightness, contrast, and color.

Luminosity masks are a concept existing in Photoshop since it introduced masks in 1994 in Photoshop version 3.0. The concept was popularized by photographer Tony Kuyper, starting in 2006, when Tony developed a technique for creating a series of luminosity masks related to the levels of luminosity of an image.

Nowadays, luminosity masks, in their different forms, are one of the most effective techniques you can use for processing architecture photography, landscape photography, and pretty much any genre of photography, both when working with color photography, as well as with black and white photography.

In their most well-known version, Luminosity masks are created using Photoshop Channels. Each channel will define a certain luminosity mask, which can then be used as a layer mask to apply adjustments to specific brightness ranges in the image. This offers precise control over the tonal values in an image, allowing you to make targeted adjustments to highlights, mid-tones, and shadows. Luminosity masks can be used for tonal or color control to achieve a certain tonal or color balance in an image.

The main categories of luminosity masks and the most well-known ones are the Highlights (Brights), the Midtones, and the Shadows (Darks). The main luminosity masks can be refined further to target different levels of brightness in the highlights, different levels of darkness in the shadows, or different levels of intensity in the midtones.

Some other programs also support the creation of luminosity masks to apply adjustments, but their use is more restrictive than the use of luminosity masks in Photoshop. The process of creating luminosity masks may vary depending on the software, but the concept and usage of the luminosity masks remain the same across all platforms.

Photoshop is the classic and the most powerful software for creating and applying luminosity masks. It gives you the highest level of control and the highest number of tools to process an image based on luminosity masks.

When we talk about luminosity masks, we are most of the time talking about luminosity masks created and used in Photoshop. Photoshop is the only program where you can make precise luminosity masks that you can refine to a high degree.

For this reason, my recommendation is to use luminosity masks in Photoshop in order to have the utmost control over the results of your edits. The luminosity masks created in Photoshop are a remarkably powerful tool to transform your images.

You can use this technique when shooting in high contrast conditions when the camera cannot cover the entire dynamic range of a scene in only one capture. When that happens, you can shoot a series of images exposed at different levels and blend them together using luminosity masks.

For instance, you shoot a bracketed exposure made up of one or more over-exposed images to increase the details in the shadows, one or more midtone-targeted exposures to cover the tones in the middle, and one or more under-exposed images to increase the details in the highlights. Then, by using luminosity masks, you retain from each image the areas that are well-exposed and create a luminosity-blended image as a result.

Luminosity masks are a rather advanced technique to use in Photoshop. In order to understand luminosity masks and be able to handle them comfortably, you need to first understand how layers and masks work.

While the scope of this complete guide to luminosity masks is not to analyze extensively layers and masks in general, following I will give you some information about them and touch on the most important aspects.

The first thing I want to say about luminosity masks is something that will be helpful to many since I know from my students that many people find it difficult to understand. And that is that the luminosity masks can be used as regular masks but they can also be used to create selections and this is where the real magic happens.

This is what the luminosity masks do, in essence. They separate the image into areas of luminosity that can be used to apply different effects selectively. They can be used to make selections of those areas in order to apply the needed effects.

In the case of the Calculations method , the other main way to create luminosity masks in Photoshop, you use both color channels and the Calculations tool to Separate the Luminosity Levels in the Image. 17dc91bb1f