Luminance Masks

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Originally Posted by Richard Lundberg

You don't seem to have used a luminance mask on the jungle or cliff or foliage or whatever it is, so that it would be at least recognizable. Why is that?

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Maybe he used one to darken them/it ?

As wonderful as they may be I often find that they also mask parts of the image that isn't wanted so hand painting is needed on the mask to take those out. Sometimes it's quicker to paint in the entire mask instead.

John
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I'm glad you started this thread, Randy. I had thought that luminosity masks were just masks applied using the luminance blend mode. :o

Here is a video that gives an overview of the 'advanced' uses of luminosity masks:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kP4r1o7RWVY

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Originally Posted by FootLoose

I'm glad you started this thread, Randy. I had thought that luminosity masks were just masks applied using the luminance blend mode. :o

Here is a video that gives an overview of the 'advanced' uses of luminosity masks:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kP4r1o7RWVY

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That video caused me to look at some others to see if PS could do it in the same fashion as the GIMP using thresholds on the mask with a copy of the image in it. Doesn't look like it can. Bit sad really because adding lights 1 2 etc or whatever takes more time. GIMP can do that as well. There is a plugin to do as many lights and darks as needed also a demonstration of how they can be created manually on the web which is a bit tedious hence the plugin.

John
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Originally Posted by Richard Lundberg

You don't seem to have used a luminance mask on the jungle or cliff or foliage or whatever it is, so that it would be at least recognizable. Why is that?

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Fair enough question, Richard. I am not sure what to say. I did apply a mask that brought out the cliff & trees but I don't recall now why it doesn't show up. I think I must have turned off that layer, preferring the darker, silhouette effect there. Or I may have just missed it. This was a series of shots and in this one I was totally engaged with the ice shelf & the reflected light on it.

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Originally Posted by FootLoose

I'm glad you started this thread, Randy. I had thought that luminosity masks were just masks applied using the luminance blend mode. :o

Here is a video that gives an overview of the 'advanced' uses of luminosity masks:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kP4r1o7RWVY

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Thanks, Greg. I like the surface & edge masking techniques especially. I will have to try them out after a bit more reviewing of that tutorial.

-Randy

Well, is there one in the series that allows recognizing what it is? Unless you were aiming for abstraction. I would think that a photograph of a landscape should be explicit.

It's worth GIMP users watching that video. It has the same things buried in it but the luminosity mask plugin is the quick way to generate lights and darks. They finish up in channels just as with PS. Selections can be saved to channels as well.

It also seems to have what I call thresholds but much to my amazement he bought up levels to do the same thing. Pity Colin isn't about as from comments he made I expected levels to be similar to the GIMP's. The video shows how it's used to set where black and white are clipped. The same thing can be done to a mask that is a copy of the image giving precise control of where the luminosity is clipped. GIMP automatically converts the mask to b&w when thresholds is used, PS etc may need this doing manually. When lights and darks are used images often require rather a lot of them to get the gradation steps that are required. It's tedious and often demonstrated on subjects where it works - the video is pretty good in that respect - not an easy one to do.

John
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I thought it worthwhile posting this link from 2012 again as it is quite a sophisticated way of creating luminosity masks.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kP4r...eature=related

Cheers

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Originally Posted by Richard Lundberg

Well, is there one in the series that allows recognizing what it is? Unless you were aiming for abstraction. I would think that a photograph of a landscape should be explicit.

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Richard,

Well, I think that criticism excludes any landscapes with silhouetting in your book. I can't say I agree there.

I went back to this image in Photoshop and even with the luminance masks, there's no recovering those darks in the cliff and trees, in this particular shot anyway. It would have required a combination of multiple exposures to get the full tonal range including that particular area.

Like a lot of my images, this was done quickly, casually and with the only intended result being just a good capture of the sunset on the frozen lake. I was happy this time that I had steps to use going down the cliffside and that they weren't iced over. On the shoreline, that ice shelf was daunting, so getting the shot & getting away without falling first was my big concern. I was a bit distracted...

Anyway, another of the shoreline & ice but with more of the detail in the cliffside. It doesn't work for me, but I think the exposure was off still . Again, I think this would have taken more than one exposure to capture it all:

http://i58.tinypic.com/dyum80.jpg

I suspect many people will prefer the earlier version. I certainly do. Possibly lightening the part that Richard seems to dislike so that very very slight detail is visible might help the shot a little. Bringing it up to actually show colour to this degree spoils the shot.

Main thing about this part of the thread is what does this have to do with luminosity masks - they can be set at any level of luminosity. There is no reason why they have to be limited to shadows.

John
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I don't know. maybe you're right, this just wasn't capturable as an easily recognizable landscape. I didn't even know it was ice until you mentioned. Sorry I commented in the first place. Maybe it could have its exposure bumped up, but without seeing the original, it's impossible.

Well, I'll just reiterate that I am glad Randy started this thread because I didn't know what I didn't know. I have spent the last couple of days searching for, and watching, material on Luminance Masks and their various uses. Now, I wonder that Adobe hasn't made the creation of them a standard function in Photoshop.

PS Yes, I am a slow learner where PS is concerned.

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Originally Posted by FootLoose

Well, I'll just reiterate that I am glad Randy started this thread because I didn't know what I didn't know. I have spent the last couple of days searching for, and watching, material on Luminance Masks and their various uses. Now, I wonder that Adobe hasn't made the creation of them a standard function in Photoshop.

PS Yes, I am a slow learner where PS is concerned.

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Some of the videos on youtube offer things that do the work for you at a click I suspect. Things as I have no idea what PS call what are essentially scripts that cause it to do a sequence of operations. For instance

https://iso.500px.com/luminosity-mas...ital-blending/

Then it's a case of learning about channel to selection with addition to the existing selection. The scripts look like they generate a lot of lights and darks to give fine control so individual ones may not be suitable. Even then some hand painting on the mask might be needed. What I haven't seen in the video mentioned or others is the mechanism used to generate them. Say lights 3 doesn't go far enough and lights 4 goes too far it should be possible to generate a lights 3.5 from them.

I suspect the actions needed to do that are the same as the GIMP. That's described here

http://blog.patdavid.net/2013/11/get...ity-masks.html

There is also a link on that page to an earlier tutorial, different result. That includes using thresholds which it seems PS calls levels from the video.

If of no use to PS users ;) at least people who use the GIMP needn't feel like they are loosing out. It has it's edge detect etc as well so the video is again of use to them. That one can be used to reduce noise avoiding edges - sometimes. It depends on how well the edges can be detected. If the edges are a selection and inverted simple surface blurs can be used on the result.

John
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Originally Posted by Richard Lundberg

I don't know. maybe you're right, this just wasn't capturable as an easily recognizable landscape. I didn't even know it was ice until you mentioned. Sorry I commented in the first place. Maybe it could have its exposure bumped up, but without seeing the original, it's impossible.

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Richard,

I am glad for your comment, though I will say it came off sounding a bit harsh to me. Never mind that though, I think when anyone sharing any of their work should be prepared for just about anything. That it wasn't "easily recognizable landscape" throws me and makes me wonder how many others might not have had that recognition. But even with that in mind, I still think it's a matter of preference and a matter of what the photographer sees in the scene and how they are trying to communicate it.

As for the ice, I'm really sorry to hear it took that much for you to 'see' it. One thing: living near Lake Michigan, I have found that the ice on the shore, especially at sunset, has an incredible range of color and can be surreal at times. If I can locate it, I will share an example from years ago that really was out of this world.

One other thought: recognizability I think is a dynamic of it's own in photography. So not 'seeing' it at first isn't necessarily a detriment in my book.

Greg,

Glad to hear you find this a useful thread. One of the reasons I brought it up was that I was putting forth a lot more effort at bringing out tonal ranges using some other methods. These masks seem to work quite well for me. I always like to hear what others are finding useful (or not!). It helps me find direction in my work.

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Originally Posted by ajohnw

Then it's a case of learning about channel to selection with addition to the existing selection. The scripts look like they generate a lot of lights and darks to give fine control so individual ones may not be suitable. Even then some hand painting on the mask might be needed. What I haven't seen in the video mentioned or others is the mechanism used to generate them. Say lights 3 doesn't go far enough and lights 4 goes too far it should be possible to generate a lights 3.5 from them.


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The reason I spend so much time researching this topic - as with other PS techniques - is that I don't like to simply install an action or a preset that someone else has developed without understanding how it works and how I can achieve the same result myself.

Tony Kuyper, Greg Benz, Jimmy MacIntyre, to name a few, have developed action panels for Luminosity Masks. Kuyper's in particular seems to be more complex than it needs to be, and makes a mystery of what is quite simple once you get a handle on it.

I have found Sean Bagshaw (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2edXDAz4gAI ) and Don Smith (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qUce6jsz4rc ) provide explanations that are more comprehensive and accessible than others.

But Matthew Norris is the only one I have seen so far who demonstrates the method of intersecting the masks. In the video I linked to earlier ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kP4r1o7RWVY ), he shows how to do this to create the mid-tone masks.

To answer your question, John: I haven't tried it yet, but I think you could intersect the Lights 3 and Lights 4 masks to produce a Lights 3.5 mask.

I am quite familiar with Lake Michigan ice having lived in Grand Rapids in my youth, it's commendable that you want to capture its annual variety. And, this thread has brought out Luminosity Masks for the first time in my long long online experience and I appreciate it. I wish your originals could be posted so that I could play with them or some real expert could render them. That is the MAJOR defect of this forum, that you have to pay for an upload/download service to be able to post originals. The tinypix or whatever it is CiC uses just doesn't cut it for additional pp.

Greg, Matt's video is good value and I believe that was where I started from after getting frustrated reading Tony's tutorials. I then found Sean Bagshaw also goes into the detail of how to intersect / subtract masks but it is in his paid series of videos.
Like you've commented, I found it very useful learning the process and understanding how to create my own tailored masks, especially when I want to use just one of the colour channels rather than the combined RGB. Though for the most part I now use the Tony Kuyper panel that has the one button actions for the full range of RGB lights, darks, mids, individual colour channels, as well as two button actions that allow you to subtract light masks from light, and darks from darks. I find these especially useful to maintain contrast, so sometimes I want to keep just a few of my brightest highlights but bring the others back a little, so I will subtract a lights 5 from a lights 3 or 4 to protect the brightest but work on the others maintaining the feathering so no halos.
BTW I learned how to use the less obvious elements of the TK panel through Sean Bagshaw as I struggled to digest Tony's own tutorials. Up till getting the panel I'd built my own actions, but found value in getting the full panel in the end.

A couple of other freebies on the intersecting process I've found over time, though not all videos:
Hougaard Malan - http://www.hougaardmalan.com/blog/ad...t-application/
Self-Intersecting Luminosity Masks at The Wonder of Light- http://www.thewonderoflight.com/2011...inosity-masks/
BW Vision- http://www.bwvision.com/luminosity-m...mediate-level/

Thanks for the links, Trace, I will check them out. I can see that it would be helpful to have something like TK's actions if I used the Luminosity Masks regularly - and I will probably go down that path eventually.

I came across a recently posted video by Lee Varis on using Luminosity Masks with Lab today. He lost me (lol), but his results are remarkable. Well worth a look if you have the time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aD4Tqf1cTc0

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Originally Posted by PhotoByTrace

Greg, Matt's video is good value and I believe that was where I started from after getting frustrated reading Tony's tutorials. I then found Sean Bagshaw also goes into the detail of how to intersect / subtract masks but it is in his paid series of videos.
Like you've commented, I found it very useful learning the process and understanding how to create my own tailored masks, especially when I want to use just one of the colour channels rather than the combined RGB. Though for the most part I now use the Tony Kuyper panel that has the one button actions for the full range of RGB lights, darks, mids, individual colour channels, as well as two button actions that allow you to subtract light masks from light, and darks from darks. I find these especially useful to maintain contrast, so sometimes I want to keep just a few of my brightest highlights but bring the others back a little, so I will subtract a lights 5 from a lights 3 or 4 to protect the brightest but work on the others maintaining the feathering so no halos.
BTW I learned how to use the less obvious elements of the TK panel through Sean Bagshaw as I struggled to digest Tony's own tutorials. Up till getting the panel I'd built my own actions, but found value in getting the full panel in the end.

A couple of other freebies on the intersecting process I've found over time, though not all videos:
Hougaard Malan - http://www.hougaardmalan.com/blog/ad...t-application/
Self-Intersecting Luminosity Masks at The Wonder of Light- http://www.thewonderoflight.com/2011...inosity-masks/
BW Vision- http://www.bwvision.com/luminosity-m...mediate-level/

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Hi, 2nd vote for TKActions and the SB tutorial dvd on hem, explains it all very well IMO
Russ

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Originally Posted by Richard Lundberg

I am quite familiar with Lake Michigan ice having lived in Grand Rapids in my youth, it's commendable that you want to capture its annual variety. And, this thread has brought out Luminosity Masks for the first time in my long long online experience and I appreciate it. I wish your originals could be posted so that I could play with them or some real expert could render them. That is the MAJOR defect of this forum, that you have to pay for an upload/download service to be able to post originals. The tinypix or whatever it is CiC uses just doesn't cut it for additional pp.

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There is no need to pay for an upload service or register or anything else Richard. :) I'm fed up with mentioning it - filebin.net. There seems to be others now with similar names now - pass on any problems related to use of those.

I agree with your comment. I have uploaded and posted raw files several times. It's always been instructive. I also often play with other peoples shots. ;) Christina thinks it's because I like PP. Not so really. Often all sorts of things can be done to jpg's but raw offers even more. Doing this gives me the opportunity to work on shots that I normally wouldn't or couldn't take. Different PP challenges in other words. Part of the learning process.

It's an odd area. I have seen shots at times that have problems that could be cured from raw and suggested that people upload them. Sometimes they do often even in situations where they would clearly benefit they don't.


John
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