This tutorial will help you in brightening up an image’s mild tone without affecting its actual highLights and shadows, splitting image’s tone with other colors, improving contract in specific darkest shadow regions.
Before starting the shadow we are assuming that you have appropriate knowledge and informations about layer masks.
We will be using a sample image throughout this tutorial.
Original sample image is provided below.
DUPLICATING THE BASE LAYER
By consider luminosity as method, desaturating the duplicated layer.
**Color>>>Desaturate **
Here, “Light Channel” is represented by the above given color image desaturated copy.
Now, our aim is to create a new layer on this basis of this layer.
It can be done by simply using channels dialog. If you are able to reach that dialog section, manually you can go through, windows>>Dockable Dialog>>Channel
Here on the top half of the window area, you will get an entry for every channel in target image (Green, alpha, blue, Red). Also, you will get the list of previously defined channels on the bottom.
Now to create a fresh “Light channel” we have to drag down any of the available channels of RGB to the below appearing window.
Due to desaturation all the RGB channels has same data and thus we can use any of them.
Now, it's time to rename the newly generated channel meaningfully by just double clicking on its name and entering or typing a new meaningful name.
By following the procedure, we got new channel Lights “L”.
We can use this newly created channel “Lights” to create channel “Darks”.
CREATING A NEW “DARKS CHANNEL”
The creation procedure of channel “darks” involves reverse process as used in channel “Lights”.
We can create “Darks Channel” with the help of few simple operations.
Select entire image
Select>>All
Subtract the channel “Lights”
Right click On “Lights” channel>>”subtract from selection”
Here you will be able to see new selections on your image representing reverse channel “Lights”.
CREATING A NEW CHANNEL “DARKS”
CREATING MORE DARKER MASKS
By now, we have created three “Dark channels” and one “Lights” channel. Now it's time to create two more “Lights channel” for Lighter tones.It involves similar in reverse procedures as in “Dark channels”.
Selection Of channel “Lights”Right click on “Lights” channel and activate it.
Now it's time to subtract channel “Darks” from channel “Lights” and save it a a new channel ( NAME IT APPROPRIATELY like “LL” CHANNEL or anything that you want).
Subtracting channel “D” from channel “L”.
Also, to achieve more enhanced Light channel you can subtract channel “D” again and again.
MID TONE CHANNEL
By know, we have 3 different channel “Lights” (L,LL,LLL) and 3 different channel “Darks” (D,DD,DDD).
Mid tone channels can be easily generated with these channels. Here, we will be intersecting “Darks” and “Lights” channel to generate mid tone channels.
*After choosing Hue of 200.
Now, just repeat the every step that we used above for Light tones. So you have to again duplicate the layer, and add layer mask this time using LL channel.
Here, I have chosen hue of 25
Finally, here is the final result that we got after all the steps and procedures.
The mid tone masks are very interesting.
We have just deleted all the layers and get back to the basic image layer.
For this mask, we just need to duplicate base layer and then we will be applying a layer mask to the base layer.
We have chosen basic mid tone mask M. Here we will apply little aggressive compression to the curves with the help of “ Adjust Color Curves”.
Hope the above tutorial helped you and now you know how to brighten up an image’s mild tone without affecting its actual highLights and shadows, splitting image’s tone with other colors, improving contrast in specific darkest shadow regions.
