Ramble: Masking with Equalize — OZONE Asylum, home of the Mad Scientists

Ramble: Masking with Equalize

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Your Text: Insert Slimies » Insert UBB Code » Close Last Tag \| All Tags UBB Help	Okay, time for a little detour. This is one of my favorite techniques, but I don't think I've really talked about it. Now, I'm a big fan of using Lum to generate masks. It's greyscale and the data is usually pretty good. Sometimes I'll manipulate RGB before extracting Lum, but mostly use Lum straight-up. Once you get Lum, how you use it to generate a mask is a matter of taste. Maybe Curves, Levels, and toss in some Gauss. Or maybe even use Find Edges and/or High Pass to generate a surface mask. For me, one of the ways I choose how to tweak is by examing what I'm after. Well, duh. What I mean is that you can divide a photograph up into highs and lows. You know, two major chunks. Or you can divide a photograph up into highs, midtones, and lows (HML). Now, dividing up into 3 chunks can be tricky. For getting HML, I absolutely detest Colour Range and using the drop-down. I detest Colour Range for a lot of reasons. I do use CR on occassion, but never for HML. You can use Curves rather easily to get HL in HML, but using Curves to get M in HML isn't really that great. It can be done, but the B-Spline can cause serious problems. This is especially true when you want to custom define the midtone. If you try to use Curves to make the midtone 180, the B-Spline will kick in and be not so good. Ugh. What is the WJ method for getting HML? Gradient Map. Quick-n-sleazy, lemon squeazy. All you need is 2 or 3 stoppers. Highs: - RGB (0,0,0) @ Loc 50% - RGB(255,255,255) @ Loc 100% Mids: - RGB(0,0,0) @ Loc 0% - RGB(255,255,255) @ Loc 50% - RGB(0,0,0) @ Loc 100% Lows: - RGB(255,255,255) @ Loc 0% - RGB(0,0,0) @ Loc 50% I've got a crap ton of G-Map presets of those and variations. Uber easy with nice and tight linear blending. Oh, speaking of linear blending, I always make sure that Smoothness is set to 0%. I hate B-Spline causing overlap and messing things up. Major ugh! Yeah, I use Gradient Map quite a bit. I've got tons of presets saved which are right there in the dialog, and giving the stoppers some wiggle is no big deal. And there is the added bonus that G-Map already works on Lum. When I get the yarbles for it, I'll toss up some images to help illustrate this little bit. Loading...
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