Luminosity masks

I finally got around to making tony Kuyper's luminosity masks. It really is an innovative way to make selections. Instead of selecting an object or a color, you can do it through how illuminated a subject is. What really makes them special is that they are self tapering, so you can make adjustments and the effect is perfectly feathered so there is no longer an issue of bad masking.

Tony Kuyper is a landscape photographer, and I played around with a test shot to see it in action, but it seems to work well with portraits, and probably anything else you would want as well, such as simulating HDR from a single photo as you can make every range more visible. Typically, the effect is used to make a curves adjustment on a narrower band of the photo then a global curves adjustment. Because the environment is really full of colors, the effect is quite perfect for the landscape photographer, while it has slightly more unintended effects in other areas.

One thing I did notice though is that when I made my actions, I made quite a few mistakes, and couldn't recognize that I had. It isn't readily obvious which areas you are selecting depending on your photograph- and even then the effect was pretty cool though I had issues getting the results I wanted.

The first photo here is a picture to test the exposure with the sky, nothing special at all. Other exposures had the sky a little washed out, and the trees darker than I would have liked. While I could mask this with color selections, the process would have been more difficult, and it would have been impossible to taper perfectly.


The next photo uses the Luminosity masks. The goal was to darken the sky, but brighten the trees. While it doesn't look completely natural (I wasn't trying to be subtle), there are not artifacts as there would be from noticeable masking.