Science or preference in general technique?

Over the past year, my general methods have changed to where I rarely use Levels or directly select areas of an image for changes. Instead, I’m relying on Curves and Luminosity Masks. My results are a lot more pleasing to my eye, but I don’t know if that’s just my personal preference, or is there some technical reason this approach seems better?

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Curves offer more control than levels and generally luminosity masks work better than the lasso or magic wand tool, so I think it is quite natural progression. Over the last year you’ve probably started looking at your photographs more critically, no?

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To be honest, I think I have stumbled through the process. I kept monkeying around till I began to see trends. OK I did read some Pat David articles.

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I think approaching image edits through luminosity masks mimics some global approaches we may have used in the past with filters in some ways. It does offer you a new way to look at modifications and maybe it helps to develop an eye towards focusing on particular tonal regions in an image.

In the paste, pulling levels around would change things globally, but you may not have been focusing on some particular tone or aspect of the image (as much as being overwhelmed by the entire image at once). Suddenly, with lum masking, you’re really only pulling things around in a particular tone region, and you’ll notice it more as you work (perhaps critically so?). Not sure. I know in the past I didn’t really pay careful attention to many areas of my images until I started focusing on their tone range specifically. Then I got more critical/careful of what was going on.

Sorry for the wall of text. I really like your posted image, btw. The sky blues and clouds are quite pleasing aesthetically to me.

In some ways the luminosity masks seem to absorb our possible clumsiness. With nine masks, a decision in one only affects the image at that specific level. Plus, such a mask is more tied to a quality of the image than a visual region.

Pat I believe it was you who once said luminosity masks have a sort of built-in blending. I was only able to achieve that via selecting areas (w/ magic wand etc) after a lot of tedious work.

Glad you like that image. Composition and subject matter are off beat, so I have tiny fan base. :wink:

@okieman Your journey to luminosity masks through trial and error and experimentation was an act of science. :stuck_out_tongue: I am sure that this technique has saved people a lot of time. :thumbsup:

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