Photoshop Creative

Danny,
My project is over... I was rewarded by a 'gigantesque merci' by my friends!
There will be more on adjustment layers in the next newsletter. The following exercice #3 is not yet defined, because I need to cover a few blend modes in order to illustrate how to deal separately with tones and colour. I want to keep it simple for beginners.
This exercise #2 should have a follow up with various ways to do midtones masking.

Here is another way to create a midtones mask:
- Duplicate your layer (Ctrl J)
- Desaturate the duplicate (Shift Ctrl U)
- Duplicate the duplicate (Ctrl J), invert it (Ctrl I) and set blend mode to difference.

- Stamp visible on a new layer (Ctrl Alt Shift E) to save the result, and erase the two duplicates.

The explanations lies in the difference mode. The midtones are hardly affected by the inversion: grey remains grey, the result is near black. White and blacks are both fully changed which gives near white.

You can now select your new layer (Ctrl A), and paste it into a mask as explained above.

Other ways to create the midtones mask may be:
- using a black to white gradient map, changed to : white to black to white... (my preferred)
- or an inverted bell curve (with smartcurves, Grants, Graffi, Hiddenelements...), same result

Michal,

I wanted to thank you again for your layers and masks lessons.

Before I had tried many times to do an OOB without any success. I tried again last week and was able to figure it out. I am sure it was a result of having done your exercises.

http://www.prestophoto.com/photos/image/1029262/26513

Thanks Danny, I am always glad to get some feedback!