What's new in v8?

• Compact interface mode**. With the expanded slider capabilities in v8, you can now hide 34 button in Lumenzia to simplify the interface and save substantial space on your screen, while retaining the full capabilities of Lumenzia. This reduces the height of the panel substantially to free up space to see more of your image or layers.
• Dramatically faster performance! Panel performance has been optimized in numerous ways, especially when using previews and the sliders.
• New slider capabilities, including**:

• Sliders for BlendIf! You can now create highly customized BlendIf masks quickly and without opening the layer styles dialog in Photoshop. This allows you to target intermediate values (such as L1.5), as well as a greater range with options such as L0 and L7.
• Slider for Smart Filter Mask feathering.
• Slider for Mask Density. This helps allow you to easily bleed adjustments through.
• Wider value slider for more precise control.
• Continuous full-screen previews when adjusting feather via precision slider.
• Workflow enhancements (double-click to reset feather/density, more text input options, improved tooltips, etc).
  

• Improved Dodge and Burn:

• Edit “Dodge” visualizations. This makes it much easier to create precise / high-quality results, as you can easily ensure that brush strokes are consistent and do not spill outside intended areas.
• Luminosity-only (color neutral) gray or transparent dodge/burn layers! This makes it easy to dodge and burn on a single layer using familiar techniques while working on portraits or other images that where color shifts should be avoided.
• Revise the brightness/color of your dodging/burning paint at any time. This makes it incredibly easy to revise your results, especially when trying to find the perfect color to mix for desired results.
• Painting sunlight into bright highlights with the new "Extreme" blend mode. This helps easily add color to near-white pixels.
• Improved workflow for visualization and working with multiple dodge/burn layers. You now have a single interface to create visualizations or new dodge/burn layers, keep the active selection when visualizing, visualize dodge layers using BlendIf, etc.

• Improved Selections:

• "Sel" has been updated to allow you to visualize saved selections before loading or combining them. [Note: this feature is not available in all versions of Photoshop].
• “Sel” can now load saved selections to a layer mask.
• "Sel" can now add, subtract, and intersect saved selections with a layer mask.
• “Color” can now be used to refine an active selection. For example, you may use this to target highlights in the blue sky (without adjusting the white highlights of a snow-capped mountain).
• Use Adobe Camera RAW (ACR) to modify the preview when creating a selection (<ctrl/cmd>-click "✓Sel” while viewing the orange preview layers).
• Expand and feather selections as you create them.
• Use any channel when loading or combining selections.

• Improved BlendIf support:

• Convert any BlendIf to a layer mask (for both "underlying" or "this" types of BlendIf). This allows for custom refinement, as well as being an excellent way to help better understand how BlendIf works. This includes support for BlendIfs targeting underlying layers, this layer, and even color BlendIfs created with Lumenzia.
• <shift>-clicking “Vignette” will automatically add a BlendIf for advanced control and results. (see demo video above)
• Apply or remove BlendIf from multiple layers simultaneously. (see demo video above)
• Multi-channel BlendIf. This is helpful for advanced targeting (such as using L2 Red with Not L2 Blue to target the warm colors in the sunset for increased saturation, without adding more blue to the sky).

• Improved Sharpening:

• Automatically generate edge/lights masks to avoid sharpening noise.
• Improved and simplified options to avoid sharpening halos along high contrast edges.
• Enhanced BlendIf masks to help avoid clipping highlights and shadows, especially loss of color in highlights.
• Improved High Pass sharpening can now avoid color fringing (sharpen luminosity only) and offers gray visualization to help choose the ideal radius.
• Edge and Surface masks via "Edge":
• Create an edge mask from a Quick Selection or luminosity selection to help target and fix halos!
• Automatically create edge or surface selections and masks for better targeting of sharpening or noise reduction.
• Create beautiful line art with one click. (see demo video above)

• <ctrl/cmd>-click "Mask" to convert any Lumenzia preview into a layer. This gives you new ways to create black and white art, as well as use blending modes for creative effects.

• Workflow enhancements, such as:

• Use Content-Aware Fill on Smart Objects. (see demo video above)
• Add more layers to an existing stack via "PreBlend".
• Create an independent Smart Object by <shift>-clicking "PreBlend".
• Use “Split” when multiple documents are open.
• Improved tooltip appearance and performance.
• And many more enhancements to subtly improve the speed and experience of luminosity masking.
  

These are just some of the highlights. There are over 350 new features, updates, and bug fixes in all.

** Note for CS6 users: While Lumenzia v8 includes hundreds of enhancements for CS6, several new interface updates require CC (such as compact interface mode and BlendIf sliders). This is unfortunately due to limitations of the >7-year old CS6 platform. Differences are primarily in appearance or workflow. Functional capabilities generally remain nearly the same. And of course, you automatically have access to the CC panel if you ever update to Photoshop CC. See the release notes for full details.

Key benefits:

• Select and mask anything, visually! With Lumenzia, you get a full screen preview of the mask before you apply it. Interactively click on the image to select (or deselect) the tones/colors to the degree you wish. No guesswork with adding and subtracting channels. Isolate the mask to to specific parts of the image with a simple selection. And you can combine group masks to easily see the overall mask impact. It’s never been faster and easier to create or customize the right mask. And the masks are created in 16-bits, allowing for smooth transitions in extreme masks.
• Click to pick! You don’t have to know which mask to use, just use the built-in zone and range tools to create the right mask automatically.
• It’s stays out of the way. Lumenzia offers a compact panel with only the buttons you need, and completely eliminates the need for the channels pallet. This leaves room to easily see your images big and beautiful, even on a laptop screen. Every action in Lumenzia creates just a single history step, so you can undo anything with <ctrl>-Z. And because Lumenzia is programmed in JavaScript, it’s smart enough to take care of errors and other tricky situations for you.
• Simplify exposure blending. Automatically stack, align, and sort your exposures light to dark for blending.
• Smaller files. Lumenzia doesn’t use channels, so your files stay small. Additionally, it offers BlendIf and vector masks to avoid layer mask bloat, as well as a "Combine" tool to reduce the impact of group masks. A typical TIF file from a Nikon D800 grows from 200MB to 1.4GB when creating channel masks, but would remain the same 200MB size in Lumenzia. And Lumenzia can combine group masks to significantly cut down on file size, often reducing file size by 20-50%!
• Beautiful vignettes with ease. Just draw a selection around the target area to create a vignette of any size, sharp, or position in the image. The vignette can be easily modified, inverted (to lighten the center) or combined with luminosity masks (to avoid darkening shadows too much).
• For more information, please see the Lumenzia FAQ and full list of features.

System requirements: Lumenzia is compatible with Photoshop CS6 – CC 2018+ on both Windows and OSX. Lumenzia does not support CS5 or earlier (however, you may wish to try my free luminosity masking panel/actions instead). Note that the CS6 user interface functions the same, but looks somewhat different (see the FAQ link above for a comparison).