Masking by the Numbers
Luminous Landscape and Glenn E. Mitchell have teamed up again to publish a new Photoshop tutorial on using tone-based masks:
“Ever take a photograph on a rainy, dreary day? Something like Figure 1 is typical. You end up with lots of contrast but not much information in the middle tones. The result is a flat, boring image.
One solution in this case is to use a tripod and bracket the shots. Take one photograph to hold the sky detail and another to emphasize the shadow detail. Then you can composite the shots later in Adobe Photoshop. That solution takes care of images with wide dynamic range, but there are other instances where we might want to adjust just the middle tones or just the quarter tones. What then?
Figure 2 shows the results of careful adjustments using a set of tone masks for the shadows, three-quarter tones, and middle tones. The image has a lot more ?pop? than the raw image in Figure 1. It is a much more pleasing image.”