An Easy Way to Create Luminosity Masks

In a lot of genres, particularly landscape photography, luminosity masks are some of the most useful tools you can employ to make selective edits. This helpful video will show you a quick and effective shortcut for creating your own customized luminosity masks.

If you're not familiar with the concept of luminosity masks, they're pretty simple but tremendously powerful in the editing specificity they allow you. Landscape images tend to exhibit a ton of dynamic range, and because of this, photographers often want to segment their editing based on different brightness levels in the image, adding different toning to the highlights and shadows, etc. This is where a luminosity mask comes in, as it tells Photoshop to create a layer mask based on a certain range of brightness (or luminance) values in the image. In this helpful tutorial from Unmesh Dinda of PiXimperfect, you'll learn an alternative way of creating luminosity masks from the standard Channels method. I actually prefer the Color Range method, as it affords you a bit more control over exactly which luminance values are selected. It's a powerful technique that can really up your landscape editing skills, so give it a try!