The power of Luminosity Masking

Get to grips with this Photoshop Channels trick and make use of our free actions

Luminosity masking is a powerful technique 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 of different areas of brightness. In our coastal scene 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 adjustments.

There are several plugins that make luminosity masks, but to understand how they work, it helps to know how to create your own. We can do so by using simple selection shortcuts in combination with Channels in Photoshop. Our 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.

1 Channels panel