Simple Way of Producing Luminosity Mask in Photoshop

Making Luminosity mask for an image specially to post process landscape pictures is comparatively a new technique. Using luminosity masks can make your images more bright, vibrant and luminous and will be more pleasing to view both on computer and prints.There are many ways of producing luminosity masks but here we will discuss very simple method for the beginners in Photoshop.

Select Brighter Areas

  • luminosity masks

    Marching ants

    Open the image in Ps, hold alt+ctrl and press 2. A selection will appear in the image in the form of marching ants and all the brighter pixels which are having more than 50% bright will be selected.

  • Now make an adjustment layer of curves to adjust the light and shadow areas. That adjustment layer will only effect the brighter pixels.
  • Make adjustment as desired and you will see a very visible affect in the overall luminosity of the image.
  • Adjust Darker Areas Or Shadows

  • After adjusting the brighter areas now you have to adjust the darker areas or shadows. To do that just make a copy of the adjustment layer by holding Ctrl and pressing J.
    new layer luminosity mask

    New layers

    New layer will inherit all the previous adjustments which are mainly focus on light areas. Now to adjust shadows you have to invers the affect. So to do that just hold Ctrl and press I. That command will reverse the previous effect and now only the shadows will be affected. Flatten the layers. Final image is now much more balanced and luminous than the starting one. This simple way of creating luminosity mask is only workable for general adjustment and is only for the beginners in Photoshop. More advanced techniques to create and use luminosity mask will follow soon.

  • saturation layer

    Color saturation

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    Adjusted Image

    CTrl I

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