Master luminosity masks

James Paterson gets to grips with Photoshop Channels and makes use of our 10 free actions

- James Paterson

Luminosity masking is a powerful editing≈technique used for selective tonal adjustments. It’s often favoured by landscape photographers because it offers a fine degree of control over the brightness of different tonal ranges. Essentially, luminosity masking allows us to create selections around different areas of brightness.

In the vibrant sunset coastal scene we have here, it means we can target the bright areas of sky around the sun, or the dark groynes in the foreground, then enhance those areas with various adjustments. There are several plug-ins that make luminosity masks, but in order to really understand how they work, it helps to know how to create your own. We can do this by using simple selection shortcuts in combination with Channels in Adobe Photoshop CC.

The Channels panel lets us isolate luminosity by loading selections of different channel information. From here, we can target the brighter and darker ranges so that we have several ‘levels’ of brightness and darkness. Once our channels are set up, you can select a section of the tonal range, then use an adjustment layer to tweak the area.

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