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Tips and tricks are the trading cards of
Photoshop. Scott Kelby makes a good chunk of his living teaching
and writing about them. Photoshop techniques, tips and tricks
are like hamsters... they beget rapidly with each new user
adopting a variation.
Currently, the hot technique is Luminosity
Masking. My buddy Jim DiVitale calls it "the claw" for its five
keys plus elbow keyboard command. My variation has been assigned
an F4 action. Now everyone is on the Luminosity Bandwagon. It's
been one of my favorite imaging tools since I learned about it
at Photoshop World 2000. Here goes:
Most digital cameras have incredible exposure
metering capabilities, with many boasting multiple area matrix
metering. However, with extreme contrast scenes, the highlights
are the first to go. If you adjust in Photoshop to recover
highlight detail, shadow areas and midtones are often affected
adversely.
Attempting to select highlights by selecting
with the Magic Wand or using the Similar command do work, to a
certain extent. But the results are often artificial looking.
Luminosity Masking to the rescue!
I'm using an image I made of Switzerland's
Jungfrau a couple of years ago. As is typical, matrix metering
resulted in a good overall exposure with a deep blue sky and
washed out detail in the highlight area, namely the snowy ledge
beneath the mountain.
The secret behind this tip is to select the
luminosity of the image, which will vary from picture to
picture. This is done by using the keyboard command
Command+Option+~ (tilde) [PC: Control+Alt+~). This results in a
selection of the highlights based upon that image's luminosity.
Since luminosity varies throughout an image, the selection is
effectively self-feathered.
The screen shot shows the luminosity selection
which is basically composed of the snowy areas on the mountain
and the bank beneath the mountain. In addition, highlight
luminosity is present in the clouds. In my judgement, I wanted
the mountain and clouds to remain unchanged and just increase
the detail in the snowy bank.
So I sent switched the luminosity selection to
Quick Mask and used the airbrush set to black to paint out the
selected mountain snow areas and clouds.
Switching back to the selection mode, I sent the
selection to its own layer (Command+J or PC: Control + J) and
set the layer's blending mode to Multiply, causing an increase
in the highlight detail in the snowy bank.
The final screen shot shows the end result with
a stripe cut out of the Multiply layer to illustrate the
difference between the raw image and the enhanced Luminosity
Masked image. I think you'll agree that it makes a difference.
The beauty of a Luminosity Mask is that it
selects highlights as they occur in the image, with feathered or
graduated edges.
Next week: the other face of Luminosity Masking. |