Contrast Masking with Photoshop / GIMP

[himarj]

I come across this web page on contrast masking with photoshop today.

http://www.luminous-landscape.com/tu..._masking.shtml

The skill was said to be originally used in wet darkroom and can be easily applied to digital darkroom. It is based on Photoshop. I do use it on GIMP to obtain the same result as I usually use GIMP to retouch my photos.

The skill is very useful to bring our details from the dark area of an under explosure photo which we normally do when shotting large light difference scens. By using contrast mask, the over explosure at bright area can be reduce and the under explosure at dark area easied. The saturation of the photo remains.

I feel the sample in the web site a bit difficult to see the effect of this skill. To this end, I posted here my sample for your reference. Hope you find it useful.

I had purposly do more than it should be to highlight the effect of this skill.

1. The original photo



2. Contrast Mask applied



3. Adjust with level, input 0, 1.5, 240 and output 10, 245

[LittleJohn]

A very useful link himarj, thanks for illustrating and sharing