More Luminosity Masking- Pt2

The Luminosity Masking can be used to make every part of a photo more visible, creating a fake single exposure HDR effect using the different masks and curves. By the way, it is critical that you label your layers, because instead of one curves layer, you could be working with 5 or 10 very easily, while ordinarily it would be too much work to create that many layers so the workflow would not get confusing.

Again I have the same two photos from before. One is the original, the second is with some layers adjustments with luminosity masks. I could have done this by shooting Raw and then converting twice, and probably should have as it is a practice that I should implement. It will mean needing more memory cards.


Original


Below with curves adjustments


I decided to take it one step further and use unsharp mask and dissolve mode on the trees. The unsharp mask heightened the differences between the light and dark areas on the trees, and the dissolve blending mode enhanced that my making them clump up instead of blend perfectly.

There is a little artifacting where the deck meets the trees, and I would have to get rid of that the normal way. In a way this looks more than real. I suspect Dave Hill could use something similar to bring out his backgrounds. So I took it one step further to see if dodging the trees would increase the effect. It's starting to look like a cheap landscape painting, but that is not altogether a bad thing.