Photoshop is my most powerful and flexible tool for image developing, and Luminosity Masks are a key component to that. Masks in Photoshop are used to control where and to what degree an adjustment will be revealed. Masks generally come in two varieties; hard edged and feathered. Hard edged masks are precise but have obvious and visible boundaries. Feathered masks blend adjustments into an image gradually, but are not precise and bleed into adjoining areas and can cause light or dark halos. With Luminosity Masks we get the best of both worlds; the precision of a hard edged mask combined with the gradual blending of a feathered mask.
Standard luminosity masks are global, or what I sometimes refer to as “entire image” masks. That is, while they control where and to what degree adjustments are applied, they still feather throughout the entire image. Sometimes this is just what is needed, but other times it is helpful to be able to customize and localize luminosity masks to target one specific area of an image.
In this short video tutorial I demonstrate one method of customizing a luminosity mask called painting a mask. If you use Luminosity Masks in your Photoshop work, I think you will find it useful.
This video is a portion of one of the chapters from the soon to be released 2nd Edition of my Complete Guide to Luminosity Masks tutorial series. While the general concepts of Luminosity Masks have not changed, this is a needed update. The new edition features some new new ideas, tips and techniques and uses Photoshop CC and version 4 of the TKActions panel. I know some folks have been looking forward to this update so I spent a good portion of the summer working on them. The goal was to complete them before my fall photography adventures kicked off this Month. I just pulled it off, completing the video editing phase on Wednesday evening. Thursday morning at 4 AM I left for Idaho and Canada, so while the videos are complete, they won’t be available until I’m back in the office on October 1. Stay tuned and I’ll keep you posted.
Sean is an outdoor photographer, digital image developing enthusiast and photography educator based in Ashland, Oregon, where he resides with his wife and two sons. His previous career as a science teacher makes photography education a good fit. Sean teams up with fellow Photo Cascadia members leading workshops. He also teaches digital image developing classes, lectures and offers a series of Photoshop video tutorials.
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