John Weatherby has developed a panel for Photoshop that will help you speed up your editing workflow. There are quite a few panels out there. The first one was probably made by Tony Kuyper, who created luminosity masks back in 2006. Other than that, Infinite Tools, Lumenzia, and Raya Pro are probably the best-known panels.

These panels’ prime function is to create luminosity masks. The task is quite complex for someone who is not a Photoshop master. And even for them, these panels save time. For example, light masks will create a mask for the brightest pixels in an image. A good use case to understand this is when you want to reduce some of the highlights of a river white-water. You would select a good light mask and apply a curves layer that pulls down those highlights.

I took John’s Pro Panel for a spin and tested some of its actions.

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