hi Steve here from photo mastery club.com and in this quick video tutorial I'm going to show you a technique that's really useful for making your green grass and trees in your images really pop so it's going to involve a couple of steps and one of those steps is creating a luminosity mask it's kind of at the beginner end of the spectrum when it comes to how complicated luminosity masking can get but if you just follow the steps in this video you'll at least be able to to do this technique and use it on your own images if you want to dive deeper into luminosity masking after watching this then I've got a couple of courses available in the photo mastery Club membership so there should be a link below this video if you want to go and check that out otherwise let's crack on with this tutorial so there are images where this technique is good for and where it works really well and this one on the screen at the moment is a great example of that so what we're looking to do with this is take all of these and you know all these sort of potentially nice greens and yellows so I've got all these bushes here and there's not really many trees but it's kind of that you know that color that trees would be which is why this works great on trees as well so you know what we're looking to do is really give this a boost in saturation and brightness because both of those together will make it really pop so the first step is actually a bit bit weird we're going to add a black and white adjustment layer we're not going to use this but the reason we're creating it is so that we can pick out the the greens in the image to then create a luminosity mask from so what we're going to do is reduce the sliders here on everything apart from greens and yellows and you'll see certain parts of the shot they're getting dark and what we're going to do with the yellows yellows is going to have more of an impact than greens actually green might not do much at all when you've got green things in your image you know especially you know sort of natural environment like this you'll be surprised that it's actually mostly made up of yellows when it comes to pixels so what we're going to do is increase the slider there on the yellows and we'll give the Greens a little bit as well actually it's very little happening but we'll just boost that as well so all of the sliders down to the bottom apart from yellows and greens and you'll see when when I do that all the sort of green parts of the shot they're getting brighter so what that's going to allow us to do is now come into the channels panel and I'm going to press command on the keyboard or that's on a Mac or that would be control if you're using a PC press command and then I'll click on the RGB Channel and now I'll come back over into my layers panel and I'm going to add a curves adjustment and now once I've done that I can actually just either hide this black-and-white layer or just throw it away we don't need that anymore and so as it is that's not going to change anything because I haven't I haven't altered the curve but when I just grab the curve and push it upwards there - to brighten the image what you'll see is that it's only in these green and yellow areas where that curve is taking effect now it is going up in the sky here as well because if we if we look at the layer mask actually I'll just hold option or alt on the keyboard and click that so we can see this layer mask is you know this is what's applied to this layer and the brighter the pixels in this mask the more of this brightening curve effect we're going to actually see in the image so just because of the nature of this particular shot the the sky the clouds and the snow up on the mountain in there are really bright anyway so what you might want to do when you when you use this for yourself is just you know come in afterwards with a black brush and just run that through the the areas that you don't want to be affected by this brining curve so I'll do that just now in the sky but that's kind of an optional step really the main thing here is to get that brightening effect down in the foreground or wherever those nice green colors are so that's the first step but where this really sort of comes into its own is when combined with a just a simple hue/saturation layer so I'm gonna add one of those now and now just like when I was using the black-and-white layer to create that luminosity mask from what I'm gonna do is select the yellows in the in this drop-down so what I'm gonna do now is increase the saturation only in the yellows of the shot so as I do that you'll see the yet the all this foreground here is brightening up nicely and getting nice and saturated and it's not looking over-the-top I mean I'm good you can see how far you can go there you're not gonna want it to go all the way to 100% probably just do it by eye - to stop where it looks good and yeah so that is pretty much it really for this technique so just these two layers here but with the additional step of adding that black and white layer in order to pick out the colors that you want to effect with these two adjustments well at least with the curves adjustment and then we're doing the same kind of selection with the with the hue/saturation but let me just show you the before and after to see what that looks like and you know that's quite a nice quite a nice increase just with two quick easy layers there so of course you can always come in and you know readjust the the curves adjustment after you've added the saturation in this case I think just brining it up even more is gonna gonna add even more impact to this particular shot so just for those two simple layers we see you know it made quite an effect there so just yeah I'll just do the same thing again I'll run through it a bit quicker this time just on a different shot just to kind of show you how this you know this kind of works across various images so first step was with the black and white layer and we're going to reduce all of the all of the sliders apart from greens and yellows greens probably isn't gonna do much actually you might you know you might want to just test the effect of removing the Greens here and just increasing the yellows as well and you know do a bit of trial and error there so as you can see by boosting yellows to 300 we've really got quite a lot of isolation in the foreground here those those grasses are really sort of standing out now the water is also quite bright so when we create the mask from this you know that's going to brighten up with our curves adjustment as well so again you might want to do some manual layer masking after the fact here but let's just pop back over into channels and I'll click our command or control click on the RGB channel back over into layers curves adjustment hide the black and white layer and let's give that a bit of a boost again so we can see we've got the brining there that's quite good might come back to that and just to fine tune it in a second first let's add that hue/saturation layer grab the yellows from the drop-down and let's pump the saturation up in the yellows you can see that's really starting to come to life there in the foreground now and as it turns out the water here isn't you know isn't going too far so I think I won't bother masking the water out but you know if I was going to be processing this shot I might just pay extra attention to these whites up here in the background so that they don't over expose yeah really that is how you do it so yeah I hope you enjoyed these tips in this quick tutorial like I said if you want to dive a lot deeper into luminosity masking then we've got two courses one is kind of like a in-between beginner and intermediate and then we've got the luminosity masking mastery course now available inside the photo mastery Club memberships so just click the link below this video if you're interested in checking that out otherwise I will speak to you again soon thanks for watching