Friday, May 29, 2015

Using A Luminosity Blend Mode in Photoshop

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I've been posting about Luminosity Masks quite a bit lately. If you were to flip back through the last half dozen (or so) posts you'd find I've been harping on them.  Today's image goes about it from a different angle.  We were invited to attend a horse jumping show just over the state line in New York this past weekend.  I thought today's image was kind of interesting because it shows the horse with all four feet off the ground.  Years ago there was a ground breaking, very early movie showing a horse in full stride.  For the first time (when the movie was slowed down) it proved that a horse's hoofs were indeed all off the ground at the same time.  It's a fairly famous clip and a Google search should bring it up quickly.  Just thought it was interesting.  To find out about using a Luminosity Blend mode in Adobe Photoshop (PS), hit the "Read More".


Whenever I see a tutorial (written or video) talking about Blend Modes in PS the predominate theme is that's there about four or five modes you're likely to use.  Screen, Multiply, Overlay, and Soft Light are the biggies.  I've only seen a couple where Color Dodge or Linear Dodge are mentioned.

Rarely do I see the Luminosity Blend Mode talked about.  With all the discussion of Luminosity Masks I see lately I started wondering what would happen if a Smart Object were copied (New Layer Via Copy) and a B&W Adjustment Layer applied.  That way you end up with a highly editable (modifiable) copy of your image where all the different colors (in B&W) [Red, Yellow, Green, Cyan, Blue, and Magenta] can be individually tweaked. 

Once you've gotten your best possible rendition of the image in B&W, if you switch your Layer Blend Mode to Luminosity your base image would have a highly flexible (typically with brighter colors) image pop up.  The nice thing about this is if one (or more) of your colors went a little nuts going from the B&W version to the applied version you can always go back (because it's a Smart Object) and rearrange the B&W "colors" to look right.

This is probably a "shortcut" version of using dozens of individual Luminosity Masks, but it gets the job done in seconds rather than lots of minutes.  Your only going to one place rather than as many as twenty.

Check it out.  It's something new to try.

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