We’re also not clipping (losing information) any shadows and highlights as well i.e. So for this photo, you can see that we have a lot of shadow and highlight information, but hardly any midtones. The taller the graph is in a certain section of your histogram, the more information there is. On the right-hand side you’ll find all the Highlight information, the brighter tones.Īnd therefore, towards the middle of the histogram, is where all your midtones are located. On the left-hand side of the histogram is where all the Shadow information is, all the darker tones of the image. This article assumes you already have a basic understanding of histograms and how they work but I’ll give a quick summary here: the histogram represents the tonal information of your photo.

Here’s a shot I got of the Coral Beach on the Isle of Skye, Scotland, when my partner and I toured there recently in October 2014. Let’s quickly illustrate this with some screenshots. This enables you to have extremely fine control over what parts of the photo are selected to make adjustments on (such as contrast, saturation etc.) whilst keeping other tones of the photo completely unaffected. In essence, Luminosity Masking is about creating highly specific selections of your photo based on the tones of the image itself. Tony provides extensive writing and information on Luminosity Masking and how to create Luminosity Masks in this article I’ll be primarily focusing and creating and using the masks in darktable, but if you want to really understand the basics I highly recommend giving Tony’s guide a good read over first. Luminosity Masking is a technique developed in the last 10 years or so primarily by American Southwest landscape photographer Tony Kuyper over at.

In this article, we will explore how to create and use Luminosity Masks in the F/OSS RAW editor darktable, so that you can make adjustments on your RAW files to isolated tones. Luminosity Masking, the ability to create selections of your image based on its specific tones for ultra-targeted editing, is a relatively recent concept favoured by landscape photographers the world over.

What is darktable