An Introduction To Luminosity Masks In Photoshop

An Introduction To Luminosity Masks In Photoshop. Learn to create and use luminosity masks in photoshop.

In this video, I’m gonna give you an introduction to luminosity masks in Photoshop. I’ll show you how to easily create as well as use luminosity masks. Hello I’m Charles. Welcome to the channel. If you’re into Photoshop, Lightroom and photography, and even a little video editing, please consider subscribing and click that bell notification so that you’re notified when we release brand new content every single week.

Oh and be sure to check the links in the description. I have a free Photoshop action download for you. This action will create luminosity masks for you, so you don’t have to recreate them every time you wanna use them.

So what are luminosity masks? Luminosity masks break an image down into various channels of luminosity. In other words, they allow you to make very specific selections in Photoshop based on how bright or dark the area is. Luminosity masks are a powerful way to edit images using the brightness values in the image itself, which is a great way of essentially telling Photoshop specifically where you want to edit the image and get a precise selection that looks natural.

So all this is done using channels in Photoshop. Channels allow you to temporarily save selections to use later. So you are creating selections based on the tonal value of the image. Luminosity masks have a subtle and soft transition. So we’re gonna start off by editing this image here. Luminosity masks are good for landscapes. And here in this photo, this happens quite a bit when you’re trying to get a sunset and you have a sky that’s brighter than the foreground, and this is a case where luminosity masks can help and it can isolate certain areas of this photo. I’m gonna start off by showing you how to create luminosity masks manually. And then later on, I’ll show you an automated way.

Manually Create Luminosity Masks in Photoshop

So to create luminosity masks manually, you’re going to use the channels panel. To start off we’re going to Command or Control and click on RGB. And we have marching ants all on the top part of this photo because it is the brightest part of the image. So we have the most or the brightest pixels selected here. And so just by holding the Command and clicking on RGB, we have our selection and come down here to the save selection as a channel. And we’re gonna call this highlights one.

So now I’m gonna show you how to use this luminosity mask. I’m going to click on my RGB and then go to my layers panel and you can see my selection or my marching ants. And I’m gonna choose a curves adjustment layer. Here with my curves adjustment layer, I have a mask that was my selection from highlights one. And I’m going to bring down the brightness and you could see it’s just changing on the top part of the image, or if I want to increase the brightness, it is again, just the top part ‘coz we made that selection for the highlights. So I’m gonna pull this down a little bit, just to make it less bright. I might add that I could have selected the sky only and used the curves adjustment layer, but the selection would not be the same as using luminosity masks and it wouldn’t look as natural.

Now I’m gonna go back in the channels. So now to get more selective, I’m going to intersect this highlights one luminosity mask with itself. And first I’m going to Command and click bring my marching ants up. In a Mac it’s Command + Option + Shift, on PC it’s Control + Alt + Shift. So Command + Option + Shift and click on my highlights one, and you could see my marching ants changed. It selected a smaller area, and now I’m going to save this selection as a channel, and I’m going to rename this highlights two.

And let’s do this again. So with my marching ants showing or my selection showing, I’m going to hit my Command + Option + Shift and click on my highlights two. So it intersected with itself, and I’m going to save another channel and call this highlights three. And I’m gonna deselect Command D, so notice now when I select highlights one that most of the sky is white or really light that’s because it’s selected. And if I go down to un-highlight two, you could see the less of my sky is selected by Command-click on there. And you can see my marching ants are right above the top of the mountain here. The shadows got darker and the mid-tones got darker. So now if I go to my highlights three, you could see that my selection is honed in even more.

So each time you create another luminosity mask, we are intersecting the mask, which means the brightest areas stay bright and the middle area starts to get much darker and the darkest areas really get dark. So now let’s click on the highlights two luminosity mask and Command + click on the mask and click on RGB and go in the layers panel. Now I want to create a new curves adjustment layer, and that’s got the selection or the mask from highlights two, and now I’m bringing down the curves adjustment layer further. So here are the first curves adjustment layer is affecting most of the sky. Next curves adjustment layer is affecting less of the sky. And if I go back to channels, and I’m gonna select highlights three, I Command + click on highlights three to get the selection, click on RGB, go back to my layers panel, create another curves adjustment layer and bring that down. And it is affecting even less and less. It’s honing in specifically to a selection that we created in our channel’s panel.

Let me show you another use for luminosity mask. If I go back into my layers panel and let’s say this mask here, I’m looking at that, and maybe I wanna change those colors of where that mask is affecting. So I’m going to bring in a hue and saturation adjustment layer. And I’m gonna borrow this mask here. So I’m gonna Alt option and copy it over to this hue and saturation adjustment layer. And so I can change the hue and here I’m overdoing it, but if I wanted more pink in the sky and I could change the saturation and there is before and there’s the after. So point being, you can make selective adjustments to the brightness, or you can make selective adjustments to the color. So I’m gonna create three more of these and then we’re gonna create the shadows and I’ll be back.

Okay, so I’ve created six highlight luminosity masks. Now let’s go and create the darks luminosity masks. So we’re gonna start off by clicking on the highlights one, turning all of these other ones off. So it’s Command or Control-click on the highlights one luminosity mask. So that brings up the selection, the marching ants. And now we’re just gonna come up here to select inverse, and we’re going to save that. And this is our first level of shadows. We’ll just call it darks one. And after that as we did before on the highlights, we intersect that mask with itself, Command + Option + Shift-click on it and save it. So that’s our next one. I’ll call this darks two. And the same thing. Keep on going Command + Option + Shift-click and save it. There is our darks well, we name this darks three, each time we’re doing this, we’re selecting a smaller portion of the dark pixels in the image getting more and more selective. And we’ll do this one more time. Command + Option +Shift click and now we’re going to save this selection as a channel.

So, okay how do we use this? Let’s look back at our image here. De-select everything. So this foreground here is pretty dark needs to come up and if I click through my darks luminosity masks, I can see which areas it’s affecting the most. So this is gonna affect some things in the sky, some of the dark sky as well as the foreground. And if I just wanted to mainly affect the foreground, I’m gonna choose darks three, just to see what happens. So Command + click to bring up my marching ants, click on my RGB, come over to my layers panel. And let’s bring up another curves adjustment layer. Can see I am bringing up the foreground and it really isn’t affecting the sky that much, if any, but there’s a start okay. I’m just gonna say darks three right there. Let’s go back to the channels. What else can we do here? Let’s see what darks four does. I’m gonna Command-click and I see all my marching ants down there, click on RGB, come up to my layers panel and create a curves adjustment. And bring this up a little bit and I can see that some of the shadows in the back of these plants here came in. So that’s how it’ll work with the shadows in an image like that.

So now let’s create the mid-tones. So, so far, this is the before, and this is the after. So now I wanna show you how to create the mid-tones and mid-tones are essentially everything that isn’t light or dark. So we’re going to select everything by hitting Command or Control + A, and then we’re going subtract out our lights and darks to get the mid-tones. So to do that, we hit Command in option on Mac or Control option on PC and click on the highlights one and the darks one. So now we’ve taken out the lights in the darkest areas, and you’ll see this warning here saying that nothing is selected more than 50%, just ignore that say okay. And you don’t see the marching bands because nothing is over 50%, but the selection is still in place. So in this case we’re subtracting out the lights and darks. And now if we save this and I am going to rename this mid-tones one, and this is what the first mid-tones luminosity mask looks like.

So let’s do a couple more. And if we wanna keep on going and creating more mid-tones on this mid-tones one, select everything, Command or Control + A and in Command option and click on highlights two and darks two and subtracting those out. And then we’re going to save that selection. And this is mid-tones two. And I’ll do this one more time, again select mid-tones two Command or Control + A Command option and I’ll click on highlights three and darks three and save that. Here’s our mid-tones three.

So how do we use mid-tones? Well, one way again, we can come down here and just click through our mid-tones and see what we like. Let’s try mid-tones three. So I am going to Command or Control and click on my mid-tones three, click on RGB, come back in my layers panel. And this time I’m going to use a levels adjustment. And if you’re not sure how to use levels, I’ll put a link in a description and you can look at that tutorial. So now we’re on the mid-tones and we can play with this. And we’re gonna add a little bit of contrast here in our mid-tones. Here’s before and here’s the after here is the before and after of the total image. So now let’s show you how to automate this process.

So now you know how to create a luminosity mask from scratch, and it’s okay to create one at a time, depending on what your needs are, but there’s another way. And this is the free download that I’m going to supply the link in the description. It is to add an action that creates all these luminosity masks for you automatically.

So after you download it on your computer, come up here to actions. And right here, see these bars, click on that and it says load actions. So here is where I downloaded it to. And if I say open, it’s gonna load my luminosity mask and it will probably be here at the bottom. So now I’m gonna go over to channels and I’m going to click on this create all luminosity masks and here they all are.

Once you’re done with all your luminosity masks, and you’re done working on your image, click on delete all luminosity mask, because if you don’t and you save your file, it’s going to just increase your file size and you don’t really need these anymore. So if I say delete all luminosity masks, they’re gone out of my channels panel. So I’m gonna create all of them again. And so same as before, depending on what you want to do, if you want to work on your lights, you will click on them and see which areas that you want to affect in your image, what areas you want to select and work on. And sometimes this is trial and error, where you may find that it’s not working exactly how you want.

If you’re not selecting the certain areas that you want. You can always choose another luminosity mask. So I’m gonna work on all these lights in this image and bring down the intensity of those highlights. So I’m going to go to lights two, and same as before gonna Command-click on my luminosity masks for lights two, click on RGB, go to my layers panel, choose a curves adjustment layer and bring this down. So just like that. And you could see it brought down some of those highlights.

Now little added use of these luminosity masks. This time I’m going to use a hue and saturation adjustment layer. And what I wanna do is reuse this mask that I had already used for my lights to luminosity mask, gonna hit Alter option and copy it up there to the hue and saturation adjustment layer, click on my hue saturation adjustment layer, bring up the properties and click on this color rise. And I can change the hue and saturation and the brightness here, something like that. Here is the before and here’s the after. you could see that I’ve changed the coloring of the lights, and I’ve also changed the intensity of the highlights I brought that down too. So that’s another way to use your luminosity masks. There’s before and there’s the after.

So now to the question of the day, do you think luminosity masks are easy to use? Let me know in the comments below, if this video was helpful, give it a like and don’t forget to subscribe. If you are more short tutorials, see the ones above and remember, it’s never too late to learn. Thanks for watching. See you in the next video.

See my photography website here 👉 https://www.charlescabreraphotography.com

see the article on photoshop levels https://charlescabrera.com/how-to-adjust-levels-in-photoshop/