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.

Download luminocity