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Luminosity Mask Color Corrections

Lesson 5 from: Lightroom and Photoshop for Architectural Photography

Randy Van Duinen

Luminosity Mask Color Corrections

Lesson 5 from: Lightroom and Photoshop for Architectural Photography

Randy Van Duinen

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Lesson Info

5. Luminosity Mask Color Corrections

Lesson Info

Luminosity Mask Color Corrections

We're now going to start working on a luminosity mask. This has become a very powerful thing in doing architectural photography. It allows you to use a strobe to kind of strobe the room, but allows you to use the ambient light to make it look real and less strobey, for a better lack of a word. So let's get going on this. We have three images here. Here's our ambient one and two strobes. And the reason we have two strobes here is because a little bit of a flash, and the one down, I'm sure to get rid of that. So let's take all three of those images, come up to Photo, Edit In, and Open As Layers in Photoshop. Now these three layers will open in and be aligned for us. We are on a tripod when we are doing this. So, soon as they open up here in Photoshop, we'll get going. All right. So there's our layers. There's our ambient. There's our base layer. We're gonna use this layer, so let's drag this one down to the bottom, and then this is the one we're going to use to retouch a little bit of an...

area. You can see right here, right in the center, my flash from the one, the first image, is in there, and we don't want to see that. So we're going to turn this layer on, we're going to click on it, hold down the Option or Alt key, and create a mask that's completely black. We're going to make sure our brush, our foreground color is white, and the brush, and we're just going to paint that out, just like that. Just get it out so we don't see that any more. And now we'll come back, and now we're gonna go ahead and turn on our ambient layer. And what we want to do here is create a layer mask. And the way this works is Photoshop is going to select the brightest parts of the image, basically about 50% and above. So we're going to go over to our channels, and just hold down the command key and click on the RGB channel. And that's made a selection for us. We're now going to come back to our layers. We're gonna come down here, and we're going to create a mask. And we're going to now invert the mask, and you can already see there's our strobed image, and right there is our ambient image. And we can adjust this a little bit. So we're going to come down and create a Curves layer, and we're going to hold the Option or Alt key. Oops, it didn't want to do it that way, did it? Let's try it again. Hold down the Option or Alt key, come up to Curves, we'll get this window: use previous layer to create a clipping mask. Just check on that, say okay. And now you can see it's linked to the one below. And all we want to do is pull this up or down to adjust how much of the clipping mask, I mean how much of that ambient layer we're gonna use. Down here, we're not using much. Here, we're using just a little bit. And we just want it enough to go ahead and make this look natural. So, oops, there it is, with just a strobe. Here it is with the ambient layer. If you want to now with this, I still think it's a little strobey, so what I might do is take my Curve, I mean my lasso tool, kind of come up here and select the ceiling a little bit, hold the Q key down, and go to Filter, Blur, Gaussian Blur, give it a nice soft blurred edge like that, and come up here, hit the Q key to get out again, and just create another Curves layer, and let's darken this down a little bit just so that ceiling isn't so bright. And if we want some of this out of here, we can just use our brush tool, a little bit bigger, maybe 30% with the white foreground color and just even darken that down a little bit. That looks nice. The one other thing I might want to do over here is you can see on the window over here, it has a color tint to it. So let's go ahead, and I'm just going to use a poly-angle lasso tool, and just make a quick selection right here, and go up to Select, Modify, Feather, say okay. Come down here to our Curves layer again, select that, and what I'm going to do is just go down to my blue channel and try to add a little blue to it. See how that helps. Maybe add a little bit of cyan just to kind of make it a little more neutral. And then let's brighten it up, so we'll just go to the RGB channel and brighten that up a little bit so it's just not so dark on that edge. And there we have it. So we started with this right here, and then we ended up with that right there, a very natural looking shot where we used the strobe, used the Luminosity mask to bring in some ambient light and make it look more normal, and less strobey.

Ratings and Reviews

JennMercille
 

You really can do anything a thousand different ways in Photoshop! Randy broke down his processes with easy to understand instruction, and made it easy to see how and why you would choose different methods to create impressive architectural images in various situations. Great class!

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