Photoshop CS6 Luminosity Tutorials

I am trying to wrap my brain around Luminosity Masking and am having a bear of a time finding good instruction. Anyone know of any tutorials they really liked that kind of gave them the missing piece of the puzzle that suddenly seemed to make it all go together?

Thanks

Have you tried this tutorial by Tony Kuyper?

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Basically, it's just the editing selected layer(s), as opposed to editing the complete RGB. Say, you want to reduce the brightness of the sky in the photo of a sunrise (too much contrast in the sky, while the details residing below the horizon, are predominantly green&grey). You choose the red layer ("select"), click on RGB again, edit curves so that the contrast is reduced (only the red layer will be affected) and you save it. The "new" photo will retain the dark details in lower part (below the horizon) while the sky will look less bright (less "highlighted")...
If you would edit the RGB (not just a "masked" layer), the reduced brightness would have "eaten up" the details in the dark areas (below the horizon)...

I haven't played with these yet, but I found a lot of good information in this tutorial. The guy books through everything, so you have to stop, go back and watch again while trying to remember the various keyboard shortcuts and what they do, but it's packed with goodies.

Here's another one that I just found, since you've piqued my curiosity, which talks more about using them for blending images ala HDR, but without using HDR software. Pardon my French, but damn!!! That's how those guys get those exposures so perfect!!


I'm definitely going to download that "Easy Panel", which will create the masks for you - though I do need to learn the steps to do it myself.

Wow... Thank you for these.

Watching PS tutorials is like eating peanuts, I swear...

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BackdoorHippie said:

I'm definitely going to download that "Easy Panel", which will create the masks for you - though I do need to learn the steps to do it myself.

Click to expand...

Apparently, there is an issue with Easy Panel and Photoshop: What happened to the Easy Panel? - Shutter...Evolve All of the features of the download still work, though, according to them. It still looks like a very good product. Please let us know how it works for you, Jake.

WM

BackdoorHippie said:

Here's another one that I just found, since you've piqued my curiosity, which talks more about using them for blending images ala HDR, but without using HDR software. Pardon my French, but damn!!! That's how those guys get those exposures so perfect!!

I'm definitely going to download that "Easy Panel", which will create the masks for you - though I do need to learn the steps to do it myself.

Click to expand...

Wanting to further my skills is what drove me to learn the luminosity masks. They are great for both manipulating color and exposure. Many of the tutorials show you how to build the masks, which I've learned, but I could use a bit of learning on navigating around and using the kazillion masks you create. I found a huge mistake that was throwing me off and screwing things up thus causing the WHAT THE FREAK! THAT DIDN'T WORK AT ALL LIKE IT WAS SUPPOSED TO. Turned out for part of creating the masks you use cnrl-alt-shft and through muscle memory I was sometimes doing cntrl-alt-Z without realizing I was doing it - muscle memory.

Glad this thread has caught some others interest to learn it at its finest levels.

One thing I noticed, simply adding 18 masks based on various levels of "Light", "Dark" and "Midtone" took my 118MB PSD file and shot it up to 816MB!! Those masks come at a serious cost, so you need to remember to delete them when you're done, and only create what you need.

BackdoorHippie said:

One thing I noticed, simply adding 18 masks based on various levels of "Light", "Dark" and "Midtone" took my 118MB PSD file and shot it up to 816MB!! Those masks come at a serious cost, so you need to remember to delete them when you're done, and only create what you need.

Click to expand...

One of the videos had mentioned exactly that - that you need to get rid of all that stuff in the end as your files grow from little lizards to nuclear fried godzilla files. Definitely something to consider before tackling this on a computer that might be just barely managing to limp along.