Take control of colour

James Paterson reveals the power of luminosity masking when you want to enhance a photo

- James Paterson

Luminosity masking is a technique that allows you to zero in on different parts of the tonal range - or different ranges of luminosity - in order to adjust and enhance areas of your photos. It's especially useful for landscape editing, as landscapes often have an imbalance between bright areas like skies and darker areas like a foreground in shade. As such, we can target brighter pixels and claw back detail, then go on to boost shadows or different colour ranges in the scene. Here, for example, it allows us to pull back the overly bright sky, tone down the strong blues in the water, and boost the greens in the grass.

Best of all, these tonal adjustments can be made in a few seconds, without the need to paint fiddly masks. Instead, we make use of the luminosity information within the image to create our masks. As such, we can simply load the luminosity of the image with a simple keyboard shortcut to immediately target the brighter areas, then begin enhancing them without affecting the darker tones. Of course, we can invert the selection if we want to work on the darker details.

To take the technique one step further, we can also delve into the three channels that make up our photo - red, green, and blue then load the luminosity of different channels to zero in on colours in our photos. Here it allows us to boost the greens with ease. And because each edit we make is on a separate adjustment layer, we can finetune the overall strength of the effect at any time.