Luminosity Masking in Lightroom

[davidlandry]

I love doing subtle landscape HDR processing in Lightroom, but it obviously can't handle everything well that you throw at it.  This weekend at a NJ Audubon landscape photography workshop, one presenter gave a brief demonstration of the Lumenzia Photoshop Action and one of the things it does quite well is manual exposure blending.  While LR introduced the Adjustment Brush awhile back, adding layer adjustments would be a radical shift, but I'd love it if LR could somehow incorporate more precise Luminostiy Masking as is available in PS.  Do people think this is a worthy and doable within LR?  I'd love to see it done nondestructively and I'd really like to minimize my trips to PS.

[rdonson]

How do you envision Lr having layer adjustments with its parametric editing approach? 

[davidlandry]

I'm no software engineer!  I only saw a very quick overview of Lumenzia, but it reminded me somewhat of the sharpening masking sliders in LR that are very parametric (I believe you're essentially selecting channels of light from darks to lights with a few other caveats of course).  I did hear some mention that some form of luminostiy masking was being considered in LR, therefore before I dig deep into relearning and more extensively learning PS, I wanted to ask more about the possibility that it might get incorporated into LR.  After all, the latest Lightroom version is starting to run out of decimals, it seems like another major release may be due sometime...

[rdonson]

If you'd like tools that ease the PS learning experience for luminosity masking you might consider what Tony Kuyper has to offer.

http://goodlight.us/writing/actionspanelv5/panelv5.html



 

[Bob Rockefeller]

How do you envision Lr having layer adjustments with its parametric editing approach?

C1 has adjustment layers and it uses a parametric editing approach. I assume, if Adobe wanted such a feature, they could do it too.

[rdonson]

Interesting, Bob.  I'm not familiar at all with C1.

[Hans Kruse]

I love doing subtle landscape HDR processing in Lightroom, but it obviously can't handle everything well that you throw at it.  This weekend at a NJ Audubon landscape photography workshop, one presenter gave a brief demonstration of the Lumenzia Photoshop Action and one of the things it does quite well is manual exposure blending.  While LR introduced the Adjustment Brush awhile back, adding layer adjustments would be a radical shift, but I'd love it if LR could somehow incorporate more precise Luminostiy Masking as is available in PS.  Do people think this is a worthy and doable within LR?  I'd love to see it done nondestructively and I'd really like to minimize my trips to PS.

After the exposure blending function called HDR in Lightroom was added I have entirely used that for situations where I needed more DR than my camera could provide. The HDR name is in fact in my opinion misleading since the word HDR is such a loaded one. Can you elaborate on cases where you found the HDR merge in Lightroom lacking for your needs?

[Bart_van_der_Wolf]

After the exposure blending function called HDR in Lightroom was added I have entirely used that for situations where I needed more DR than my camera could provide. The HDR name is in fact in my opinion misleading since the word HDR is such a loaded one.

It's mostly caused by a loose use of terminology.

There is 'HDRI' on the one hand, and there is 'tonemapping' on the other hand.

HDRI, the imaging part, has to do with capture processes that allow capturing a large range of luminance levels, either by using low noise + high saturation level sensors, or by the adding of multiple levels of exposure (e.g. by EV bracketing) which allows exceeding the range possible from a single capture.

The tonemapping part is basically something we already used, e.g. by applying an S-curve Levels adjustment, but for images with huge dynamic ranges that would still result in relatively low local contrast. That's why locally adaptive luminance adjustments do a better job, let's call it 'HDR tonemapping'.

Cheers,
Bart

[Hans Kruse]

It's mostly caused by a loose use of terminology.

There is 'HDRI' on the one hand, and there is 'tonemapping' on the other hand.

HDRI, the imaging part, has to do with capture processes that allow capturing a large range of luminance levels, either by using low noise + high saturation level sensors, or by the adding of multiple levels of exposure (e.g. by EV bracketing) which allows exceeding the range possible from a single capture.

The tonemapping part is basically something we already used, e.g. by applying an S-curve Levels adjustment, but for images with huge dynamic ranges that would still result in relatively low local contrast. That's why locally adaptive luminance adjustments do a better job, let's call it 'HDR tonemapping'.

Cheers,
Bart

Bart, I agree what you wrote, but my point is that wish that Adobe had called it something else without any reference to the acronym HDR.

[Bart_van_der_Wolf]

Bart, I agree what you wrote, but my point is that wish that Adobe had called it something else without any reference to the acronym HDR.

I understand and agree.

Cheers,
Bart