I’m constantly working to improve Lumenzia and excited to share with you some ground-breaking new tools to help make luminosity masking both easier and more powerful.

Split-screen luminosity masking

Lumenzia has always offered the ability to create completely custom selections of any tone.  However, there are still times when your mask may need local refinement with the paintbrush.  Up until now, you could either view either your mask or your image while refining the mask, but not both.  However, with the new “Split” option in Lumenzia, you can see both simultaneously!  This makes the process of painting on a mask dramatically more intuitive and precise.  It’s also a great tool for learning and exploring, as it helps make it easy to understand how your mask is interacting with the overall image.

In the Split demo below, I revisit a previous tutorial image to show how how to use the split screen visualization to manually blend two exposures together.  You can easily see where the mask is being painted in, and where it needs more work to get the best results.  At the end of the demo, I also spend some time showing more of the capabilities of this new tool.  Split is designed to automatically split the screen horizontally or vertically based on the proportions of your image.  It also includes a function to help zoom and sync the mask and image displays so that you can narrow in on tricky details – such as moving trees or fringing at the edges of a blended object.

 

Range picker to select custom midtones

Midtones can be very tricky with luminosity masks.  The standard channel masks (M1, M2, etc) are helpful for making contrast adjustments, but are blunt tools that aren’t useful for working on specific objects.  Zone masks are much more useful, but the real world often defies our attempts to put objects into neat little buckets.  Lumenzia’s “zone picker” tools have been helpful to make sure a particular tone and the adjacent tones are selected, but it still doesn’t let you precisely define the darkest and lightest tones of interest.  That’s why I’ve created the new “Range Picker” tool, so that you can now select any custom range of midtones.

The Range Picker interface is similar to the Zone Picker.  However, instead of building a mask centered around a single user-selected tone, the Range Picker builds a mask that includes two user-selected tones and everything in-between.  The resulting mask is designed for natural tonal transitions, and the user can control the these transitions as well.  You can also use the Range Picker to select a range of tones to protect, rather than adjust, if needed.  In the demo below, I show how this new tool can be used to help precisely select the church in this image to lighten the primary subject and add contrast to strengthen the image.

 

But wait, there’s more…

And beyond the new “Split” and “Range” tools, there are several other enhancements in Lumenzia v1.6, including:

• PreBlend is faster than ever with an option to quickly close all source documents (with or without saving changes)
• PreBlend now retains the XMP/EXIF data, so that you can see and share shooting details such as the camera used, focal length, etc.
• “✓L” custom boosted range algorithm has been improved to show better preview for extreme light/dark tones
• And more.  Click here for the full list of enhancements in v1.6.

Lumenzia v1.6 is a free upgrade for all customers (updates are always emailed to the email address on record, which is typically the one you use with PayPal – be sure to check your spam/promotions folders if you haven’t already seen a link to download).