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Take your photos to the next level with Lightroom’s luminosity and colour masks

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Luminosity masks are an extremely valuable tool within Photoshop, particularly for landscape photographers who are often dealing with high dynamic range scenes that can leave scenes looking a little uneven. Sure, you can leave it up to semi-automated HDR software to try and pull all that detail out of a raw, but luminosity masks allow you to do it with a very specific level of control.

Well, you may not know that Lightroom now has luminosity masks built right in, allowing you to make fine-tuned adjustments to different parts of your image, based solely on their existing brightness level. In this video, photographer Alex Armitage shows you how they work and how you can use them to even out your landscape shots.

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Infinite Tools new Infinite Luma panel lets you create luminosity masks the easy way

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Luminosity masks are one of the most powerful tools available in photo editing software. But they can be a pain to create manually, and while you can create actions to make a set for you, sometimes you need a little more control and accuracy.

That’s where Infinite Tools’ new Infinite Luma panel comes into play to help you create luminosity masks with ease. You get a lot of control over exactly which brightness range you’re targeting and exactly what you want to do with that range – Do you want to create a selection? Apply it to an existing mask? Or a group? Or just make an alpha channel?

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An easy way to create luminosity masks for perfect landscape selections

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Luminosity masks are one of my favourite things about editing images in Photoshop. They offer so much more power than you can get in Lightroom or Adobe Camera Raw. Creating them, though, can often be a long winded affair. And a given set of actions to create them may not always work so well on any given image.

In this video, Photoshop wizard, Unmesh Dinda shows us a way to create luminosity masks very quickly and easily. It’s a method that also offers a lot more control over the “old way” of doing things, too. Unmesh does walk us through the old way, too, because it’s always good to know multiple methods. But it just goes to show how quickly the other process works.

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How to Color grade using Luminosity-Masks

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As you probably know, I am a bit obsessed with colors lately. While I was obsessively looking around and searching and asking people until they didn’t answer my requests anymore, something popped up and I have to share it because it’s simple and brilliant:

Color Grading using luminosity masks.

Zoë Noble just released a 10-minutes tutorial on Youtube, explaining the process on a very nice beauty-image.

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Making perfect skies with luminosity masks and Blend If sliders

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Masking different layers based on brightness is an often tricky but vital Photoshop skill to have. There’s a bunch of different ways of doing it from the simple to the advanced. Two of the most common methods are by using Luminosity Masks or with Photoshop’s “Blend If” layer options.

While the two might appear to do similar things on a quick glance, there are some pretty distinct differences between the two. Black Rudis from F64 Academy looks into both methods to show us how they work. Each has advantages over the other depending on what you’re trying to achieve. And both will let you do things that the other simply cannot.

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Before & After – A post processing comparison with Peter Stewart

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I like to approach my digital photography with a certain sense of the fantastical and the surreal. Many of my architectural and cityscape images feature the use of bracketed multiple exposures, which allow me to retain highlight detail in things like window lights and neon signs when shooting at night, or shadow detail in underexposed areas of the frame I want to call attention to.

The majority of my editing is though Photoshop, with the process starting in Adobe CameraRAW. I’ll take each of my bracketed exposures and make my initial adjustments there to things like color temperature, saturation, highlight/shadow detail and perspective correction.

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