Lumenzia Photoshop Luminosity Masking Tools

[Peter De Smidt]

I've been using Tony Kuyper's luminosity mask actions in Photoshop for quite a while. Recently, Daniel Moore told me to check out Lumenzia. You can see a short video on it here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=76TSQJLnahs

The price is reasonable, and the functionality looked great, and so I bought it. I only have a few days use under my belt, but so far I'm impressed. The system makes visualizing the effects very easy, and the the method keeps file sizes down. If you like luminosity masks, check it out.

[DennisD]

Hi Peter,

Thanks for the helpful post.

I use luminosity masks frequently and find them to be very useful. I like Tony Kuyper's action set which is excellent, particularly the updated version. It's far more robust than the original. Some of the extras, such as the web sharpening action are also great.

I'll definitely look into Lumenzia.

I've found that luminosity masking really provides an excellent and unusual degree of selective control over highlights, mid-tones and shadows. I'm simply unable to achieve the same results with traditional darkroom methods (and IMHO, I'm a very experienced printer).

That said, one has to be willing to scan negatives to photoshop and print via inkjet.

[DennisD]

Further on this subject:

This afternoon, I was exploring Lumenzia. It seems to have excellent functionality.

I also found that Tony Kuyper, who developed the original luminosity action panel, has just introduced an even newer version (v4) than the one I've been using. It has more features and better functionality than the previous excellent versions.

Both products, Lumenzia and Tony Kuyper's, are worth investigating if you're a photoshop user and interested in the advantages of luminosity masking techniques.

[Christopher Barrett]

I've been using the TK Actions since '09 and they've done wonders for some of my imagery. After seeing this thread, I've upgraded to his V4 Panel. Have you guys seen anything in Lumenzia that warrants adding it in addition to TK V4? I'm heading up to a cabin in Michigan for the week, so I'll have some time to explore the new add-ons (when I'm not out shooting the 4x10 and 'Blad).

CB

[Preston]

Christopher,

Like you, I've used Tony's masks for years and find them to be very capable. I'd to obtain the new v4 panel for CS6, and I would interested to hear how you like it once you've worked with it a bit.

The Lumenzia panel looks interesting, as well.

--P

[Lenny Eiger]

I couldn't help but notice that he went from a 200 mb file to a 1.4 gig one in the video. (A 7-fold increase.) Does this mean if I start with a 2 Gig file that I will end up with 14 Gigs?

Any of you folks tried this with larger files?

[Peter De Smidt]

To test this, I loaded a high resolution 8x10 scan. It was 2.2 gigs. Using a Lummenzia mask added to a layer increased file size to 2.9 gigs.

Doing the same thing with Tony's channel action gave 3.67 gigs. Deleting the channel but keeping the curve layer with mask gave 2.93 gigs.

[bob carnie]

hey Peter.. when working with a large file do you find the computer slows down too much to make any work extremely frustrating?? second question when I have a largish file I cannot get my brush size very big which is a big PIA, For some of my work I love a monster size soft brush with the opacity low to gently curve in burns and then use the ruby mask, shrink the brush size and take out unwanted density.So do you
have a way of increasing brush size on a 2.9 gig file?

[Peter De Smidt]

As far as I can tell, the brush size is limited to 5000px. For most things, a 2.9 gig files runs just fine. Really processing intensive processes, such as surface blur, do slow down, but then I rarely use such things. I mainly do masks with curve adjustment layers, cloning, and healing.

I built my computer about 5 years ago, aiming mainly for a good value to performance ratio. It does have 32 gigs of ram, and I use a Samsung SSD as the system drive, with a separate one for Photoshop's cache drive.

[Kirk Gittings]

To test this, I loaded a high resolution 8x10 scan. It was 2.2 gigs. Using a Lummenzia mask added to a layer increased file size to 2.9 gigs.

Doing the same thing with Tony's channel action gave 3.67 gigs. Deleting the channel but keeping the curve layer with mask gave 2.93 gigs.

So what do you think makes Tony's action so bloated?

[Lenny Eiger]

To test this, I loaded a high resolution 8x10 scan. It was 2.2 gigs. Using a Lummenzia mask added to a layer increased file size to 2.9 gigs.

I was more interested in the "setup action" that adde the palette and all the zone choices, etc. I would expect the size increase from adding a single adjustment layer and would not be concerned with a small increase.

I was wondering about the whole thing... before deleting unwanted channels...

Am I missing something?

[Peter De Smidt]

I'm not sure I'm following, Lenny. The palette uses very little memory, and it doesn't add to file size. If you use it to create a selection, it doesn't leave a new channel in the channel palette. There's nothing to delete.

[Lenny Eiger]

It was at the beginning of the video... I wasn't sure what he was looking at, to be honest. It could have been history states or alpha channels... but he pressed a button and a pile of things happened in succession. He said the file went from 200 mb to 1.4 Gigs..

I didn't know what was happening... It looks useful. I guess I'll have to try it out...

[Peter De Smidt]

He offers free luminosity mask actions. These do what he demonstrated. In other words, the free action makes all of the masks and saves them as additional channels. This is what makes the file size jump so high. The Lumenzia system does not do this, which is one of it's advantages.

[bob carnie]

Hi Peter

I trust your judgement so I would like you to help me out a bit here.. I have never used either one of these luminosity mask action programs, I am a die hard, curves , levels, LAB-RGB kind of worker, I rarely use selections as I can work at areas in many ways due to a lot of Dan Marguilis explanations.
I do not use any plug in's for sharpening, I prefer to go to the image and work the amount , radius and threshold myself.

I know you are well versed in Photo Shop, so my question is could you explain the value of these systems, that you think would benefit me beyond my scope of PS?
I am open to others jumping in on this question , but my question is directed to someone who uses both and can clearly describe the differences, benefits, and workflow .
I am not interested in video, or advertising just plain real world experience and not second hand opinions.

thanks

Bob

I've been using Tony Kuyper's luminosity mask actions in Photoshop for quite a while. Recently, Daniel Moore told me to check out Lumenzia. You can see a short video on it here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=76TSQJLnahs

The price is reasonable, and the functionality looked great, and so I bought it. I only have a few days use under my belt, but so far I'm impressed. The system makes visualizing the effects very easy, and the the method keeps file sizes down. If you like luminosity masks, check it out.

[Peter De Smidt]

Hi Bob,

Like any technique, luminosity and saturation masking aren't the only ways to do good work, just as making moves in LAB or using apply image isn't appealing to some. Luminosity and saturation masks are just another way of making selections. I use them mainly for color work, and they can be very good for manually combining multiple exposures, such as with high-end interior work.

Saturation masks allow you to mask off the image according to saturation. Suppose you want to increase the saturation of the low saturation greens in an image. You can create a vibrance layer, but that only has one slider. It will raise or lower the saturation of all of the colors that aren't very saturated in the image. Alternatively, you can make a mask that selects all of the low saturation colors. Now create a hue/saturation adjustment layer, using the saturation selection to make a layer mask. The hue/saturation adjustment layers a allow you to limit the changes to specific colors. Without the layer mask, the hue/saturation layer would effect all of the respective color in the image, whereas with the saturation mask, only the values of that color with a low saturation are effected. So in this case, using a saturation mask is a way of making a more refined change to the image.

Luminosity masks allow the same type of refinement. For instance, some images are helped by increasing mid-tone contrast. One way is to use Hiraloam (High Radius Low Amount) sharpening. One danger with this is tanking the shadows or blowing out the highlights of the image. You can use a duplicate layer, apply an unsharp mask filter with a radius around 70 and a low level to taste, and then use the blend lf sliders to keep the effect from the darkest shadows and highlights. One issue with this is that the blend lf adjustments are very coarse. An alternative way is to apply the hiraloam sharpening to a layer with a mid-tone luminosity selection used as a layer mask. It will automatically be very feathered, and it'll allow you to make a stronger mid-tone adjustment without the problems with shadows or highlights.

[Richard Boutwell]

The file size explosion with these kinds of actions is from the multiple channel duplications that are done to create each of the different "zone masks" and other kinds luminosity masks. If you are working with small format digital capture it might be ok, but when starting off with respectable scans the extraneous channels can really gum up the works (and how many are realistically going to be used).

I tend to make them on the fly just by for doing layer masking by inverting an empty layer mask (fill with black), loading the gray channel as a selection (if I want to affect the highlights or inverting the selection if I want to affect the shadows), hide the selection outline (so you can see how the adjustment begins to come through), and then paint with white until it's right (and then make sure you deselect...)

All that becomes pretty fast when you get used to it and it doesn't take any more time than trying to find the mask you really want to use, and you are not burdening the system with unused channels.

[Peter De Smidt]

Richard, yes, that works fine. Tony has some pretty detailed pdfs that explain exactly what his actions do, and he encourages people to make their own actions, if they feel like it. Or do them manually, if you don't use them that often.

[Preston]

In my Actions Panel, I have Tony's Masks actions. I can choose to create any given mask as either curves, levels, or channel. When I create (say) a darks mask as a curves layer, I get the adjustment layer and a darks mask item in the channels palette. If I then create a dark-darks mask, I get the new adjustment layer, but the channels palette now shows only the dark-darks mask. If select a layer that does not have a mask, the channels palette shows only the color channels. So, I conclude that the file size explosion is not as severe as it would be if the masks were created initially as channels.

--P