Late to the Game with Luminosity Masks

I had read about luminosity masks (LM) in Photoshop (PS) a while back. I am just now getting around to trying them out. Kudos to Jason Odell and his book, "Mastering Luminosity Masks: A Photoshop User’s Guide" for a great explanation of the techniques, and providing PS actions that speed up the process.

The gist of the LMs is creating PS layer masks based on luminosity, or light range, values in a given scene. LMs give another approach to localized image adjustments. Once the LM based layer masks are established, one can use any adjustment that is supported in PS layers in a highly localized way. I suppose in this way, this is analogous to the Nik's control point tech used in Viveza. Time will tell whether LM masks are easier OR as powerful as control points.

As an aside, one of my pandemic social distancing lockdown objectives is the improve my PS skills. I have stumbled along in PS, picking up techniques here and there, and occasionally getting plug-ins like the Nik Efex. The reason I hesitated trying other layer based techniques is because I have been intimidated by the creation  and manipulation of accurate layer masks. Using LMs goes a long way toward getting past the hurdle of creating layer masks for me.

Here are the first two attempts and using LMs. These are two intentionally extreme contract shots. without using LMs, getting the background to go black, while maintaining highlight detail was challenging at best. By using a luminosity mask that just included the dark tones while excluded the bright light values of the grass seed made darkening the background trivial.

Previous attempts at editing these frames ran into challenges because using global adjustments to try to darken the background ended up darkening the middle of the grass seed also. I couldn't make the background go as dark as I wanted without making the middle of the grass seed too dark.

This is just one example of the use of LMs.  More to come!