Activate the Brights mask/channel by ctrl/cmd+click on its thumbnail.To further refine the Brights selection you need to: When working with Luminosity Masks we often want to further refine the selection and work with even more specific parts of the image. The selection we made in the steps above is the broadest bright mask that defines all the bright values of the image. Look at the new channel layer for a more accurate display of which parts of the image will be affected (white reveal and black conceal). That means that there are still areas that are selected that are not defined by marching ants. Note: Photoshop only creates marching ants around areas that are at least 50% selected. This allows us to use it again or further refine the selection. The second step is to save this selection as a new channel. Once you’ve opened an image in Photoshop, simply follow these steps: There are a few different ways to create these selections but I’ll stick to the easiest and most common version. Let’s start by creating the Brights: Creating the first Brights/Highlights masks It might sound a little confusing to begin with but the good news is that creating your first Luminosity Mask isn’t that difficult at all.īoth the Brights and Dark masks are quite straight forward but it gets a little more complicated when making the Midtones. Not every adjustment needs one but there are always some that do. In fact, I often use them multiple times during a workflow. I use Luminosity Masks for the majority of my images and I have since first learning about them about a decade ago. Now you can create a selection, or mask, that targets only the shadows and avoids introducing the adjustment to other parts of the image.

But making this adjustment also introduces some blue to other parts of the image, which doesn’t look good at all.

This can be done through the Color Balance Adjustment Layer. However, the shadows are a little too yellow and could benefit from a colder blue. It’s a nice balance between the cold and warm tones and you want to keep this contrast. Let’s say you have a photo of a winter landscape. We’re going to look a little closer at how Luminosity Masks work in a minute but let me give you this small example: Not all adjustments look good on the entire photo. I used Luminosity Masks to target only the highlights in the sky when processing this.

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