CHANGING CHANNELS
James Paterson shows you how to get to grips with this Photoshop CC Channels challenge
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 plug-ins 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 enables us to isolate Luminosity by loading selections of different channel information.
From here, we can target the brighter and darker ranges of the image so we have several ‘levels’ of brightness and darkness. Once channels are set up, you can select a section of the tonal range, then use an Adjustment Layer to tweak the area. Open the Luminosity.jpg start file, or one of your own images and let’s get started...
FREE ACTIONS
WE’VE supplied a set of 10 Actions that create Luminosity masks. Download link on the left. To load them in Photoshop, go to Window >Actions and click the menu at the top. The first Actions let you create either three or five levels of Luminosity channels, either with or without Curves layers for each. Several of the Actions let you apply specific edits, like shifting the colours in a sky to make it more pink. Experiment with the Actions, then go to the Layers panel and tweak the Adjustment Layers to suit your image.
PHOTOSHOP CC
STEP BY STEP MASTERING LUMINOSITY MASKS
01 CHANNELS PANEL
This separates the image into red, green and blue channels (for RGB images). We can also create our own channels. To begin making Luminosity masks, hold Cmd/Ctrl and click on the RGB channel. This loads the Luminosity of the image as a selection. Once done, click the ‘Save selection as channel’ icon. This is the first level of Highlights. Double-click to rename it as Highlights 1.
02 MAKE HIGHLIGHT CHANNELS
After making an initial channel, you can target the next level of brightness within this channel. Hold Cmd/Ctrl+Shift+Alt (this is the keyboard shortcut for Intersect) and then click on
