Video Tutorials: Luminosity Masking

Tony Kuyper and Sean Bagshaw have collaborated on a series of video tutorials demonstrating Tony’s Photoshop technique for isolating particular tonal ranges within an image (luminosity masking). This technique allows very precise control of the areas within an image where a photoshop adjustment will be applied, and does so using the luminosity information of the image itself so that the selections and masks blend perfectly into the original image. Its a very powerful set of techniques with a bit of a learning curve even for relatively experienced photoshop users. Now, however, Tony and Sean have produced a set of extremely clear, logically organized video tutorials to walk us through the process of creating and using these masking techniques to finely adjust image tonality, contrast, and color saturation. Sample videos are available for a test drive. While the tutorials (and the PS actions Tony created to automate the most tedious part of the process) are not cheap, they do unlock some of the super-powers hidden within Photoshop at a price less than you might pay for a plug-in. Highly recommended.

Pro tips for photographing the Mayan Apocalypse

2012 year in photos

from the Atlantic online

New gallery site

I’ve moved my main photo gallery to Smugmug, largely because I like the appearance and the UI much better than Flickr. As a result, some of the older posts on this blog featuring links to images that used to be hosted on Flickr may now be kaput.

Seville shadows

One of the challenges of shooting in Seville is the very strong contrast between hard sunlight and strong shadows. Here I took advantage of that to make the shadows the center of interest in this image.

HDR: Plaza de Espana, Seville

I spent several hours shooting at Plaza de Espana one morning. I knew there would be strong light and deep shadow, so I planned to shoot HDR brackets and brought my tripod. For this image I shot 7 bracketed exposures with a 10-20 zoom lens at about 15mm, aperture set to f13. From Lightroom, the 7 exposures were exported to HDR Expose 3, merged to HDR & tonemapped. Then the resulting HDR image was taken back into Photoshop. I used Tony Kuyper’s luminance-mask-based Triple Play actions to further balance the tonal range. Finishing touches were applied with Nik Color Efex Pro and Lightroom.


BTW: this location served as the backdrop for a scene in one of the Star Wars movies:

Breathtaking time lapse from Space Station