Expanding Horizons – Luminosity Masks

April 17, 2016 by lauramacky 60 Comments

This image was taken from the Presidio in San Francisco last night. The sunset was absolutely glorious! I’m going to create a camera club event here soon because there is so much to explore even without the beautiful Golden Gate Bridge.

I’ve been exploring the use of Luminosity Masks lately. Basically Luminosity Masks are a way of making advanced selections in Photoshop based on luminosity values. So let’s say I wanted to select everything but the bridge and the land to create a mask. Normally I would have to go through a selection process by using the magic wand, the quick selection tool, color range selection or a host of other ways to isolate what I wanted to mask. Instead of that way, I use the Lumenzia panel which I’ve loaded in photoshop. (You can see it in the screenshot I’ve included in this post.)

Lumenzia is developed by Greg Benz and is something you load into photoshop which ends up being a panel readily accessible in your workspace. This is a purchased product, but I can already tell it will be a staple for my processing. Greg’s tutorials are very clear too and there’s a help button in the panel to access anything you want to know. Very convenient! I don’t have to go wading through my browser bookmarks to find tutorials. Yay!

As an example, you can see in the screenshot of my Photoshop workspace a layer mask called L2 Solid color. I wanted to apply a color filter to everything BUT the bridge and the land because I wanted to add an orangey hue, so rather than trying to manually select the bridge and land so I could hide them with a mask and apply a color filter to everything else, I clicked on different buttons in the panel which temporarily brought up different masks based on luminosity. I kept clicking until I found one that most closely applied black to the bridge and land and white to everything else, which in this case was the L2 button. I then clicked the button called “Solid” to automatically bring up a color filter where I then selected the color. Voila! Selection made, color filter applied! How convenient is that!? Of course this is a very simple example but you can see the potential here. You can adjust the mask of course by brushing on it with various opacities of a brush if you wanted to refine the selection even more.

Needless to say I love new things that make my life simpler and my work better.