Pastel Fantasy

[Michael Gerald-Yamasaki]

Greetings. I've been pondering color palettes and how I tend toward a particular slightly warm, saturated, primary set in my own work, but appreciate the varied palettes that appear here and elsewhere. So, I've been experimenting. Here I have a (omg) pastel.



Started with a luminosity mask inverted applied to a solid fill layer, some shade of violet & blended (maybe soft light)
A few Nik Color Efex - Photo Sylizer, Pastel, and Vignette Lens.
And darkened ulc with flipped urc and some cloning and Gaussian blur. Removed green grass laying over beak & feathers near beak (fill layers for color matching, masking, blending).
Uprez detailing.

Thanks for looking.

Cheers,

-Michael-

[Nancy Bell]

The violets and pinks give this a beautiful, delicate feel. It feels like pre-dawn, and the hummer is already searching out blossoms. Fabulous composition. I really like the sharpness of the hummer & then the blurred wings that transition so well into the softness of the flowers. A very well done experiment! Don't stop.

[Judy Howle]

You chose a beautiful color palette. It really does have a fantasy feel. I agree with Nancy's comments on the bird. I know how hard it is to photograph a flying hummer!

[Diane Miller]

Very nice! I love the colors and they fit the subject very well.

I'll have to experiment with your inverted luminosity mask color methods. Something I've never tried.

[Michael Gerald-Yamasaki]

Nancy, Judy, Diane,

I really appreciate your comments. Thanks much.

Diane,

I had forgotten how to use luminosity masks until the recent discussions here & there on BPN. Inverting the mask and using with a color fill layer allows for something like wb but with interesting flexibility using a combination of the color picker, blend modes and opacity.

Ooo. Multiple fill layers with the inverted luminosity mask with saturation blend mode on one... fun, fun, fun. ;-)

Cheers,

-Michael-

[Dennis Bishop]

I'm not at all sure what you did or how you came up with it, but I really like the result. The colors, textures, and composition are terrific. Great capture of the hummingbird, too.

I'd started playing around with luminosity masks, and this makes me want to get back to it.

[Diane Miller]

What Michael did here bears no resemblance the the usual references to luminosity masks that we see here. I'll let him fill in more details (or rebuttal) but if I understand what he is describing, it's very similar to split toning, although it would have more ability to avoid tonal overlap between darks and lights if you use "second order" or higher masks.

What I see commonly described in other forums here for luminosity masks (their simplest use) is better done in LR / ACR with the Shadows and Highlights sliders. Luminosity masks are an old technique going back to 8 bit scans of film (similar to a JPEG capture today) where we didn't have the tonal detail to work with that we do now from a RAW file.

Michael... over to you. Maybe a tutorial??

[Carl Walker]

Micheal I think this is great although I too have no idea how you did it. The bird is really well detailed and the colours and textures are super here. TFS

[Christopher Miller]

Love the pastel color palette, Michael! It gives the image such a beautiful feel. I also like how the softness of the flowers contrasts with the sharpness of the hummingbird.

[Michael Gerald-Yamasaki]

What Michael did here bears no resemblance the the usual references to luminosity masks that we see here. I'll let him fill in more details (or rebuttal) but if I understand what he is describing, it's very similar to split toning, although it would have more ability to avoid tonal overlap between darks and lights if you use "second order" or higher masks.

What I see commonly described in other forums here for luminosity masks (their simplest use) is better done in LR / ACR with the Shadows and Highlights sliders. Luminosity masks are an old technique going back to 8 bit scans of film (similar to a JPEG capture today) where we didn't have the tonal detail to work with that we do now from a RAW file.

Michael... over to you. Maybe a tutorial??

Diane,

What I'm doing is actually fairly simple -

• On a duplicate layer (not background layer), in Channels view, Ctrl-Click the RGB channel (This creates a grayscale selection or a luminosity selection)
• Then in Layers view, create mask (luminosity selection becomes the mask)

What a mask does is in essence is to choose the current layer when black and the underlying layer when white, and a combination of current layer and underlying layer for shades of gray to the degree of the shade.
The luminosity mask created above is just a grayscale image of the original. You can see this grayscale image in the mask thumbnail of by alt-clicking the mask (or whatever on a mac).
So the luminosity mask chooses more of the current layer for brighter areas and more of the underlying layer for darker areas.

Inverting the mask, inverts, well, the masking. underlying layer for brighter areas and current layer for darker areas. (select mask, Image->Adjustments>Invert).

Now that the mask is made what to do with it? Tonal adjustments with the uninverted mask using multiply or screen blend is the usual deal. Opacity to taste.
What I did for the OP is create a solid fill layer and move the inverted mask on to that layer (just click-hold on the mask and slide it to the solid fill layer). Change the blending mode to Overlay, adjust opacity to taste.

Now, what is fun is to click on the fill layer to bring up the color picker for the fill layer. Slide the hue slider (in the middle of the color picker window) around to different colors and see the impact on the image color balance.

Additional fill layers with other blending options add to the fun. ;-)

Cheers,

-Michael-

Dennis, Carl, Christopher - Thanks much for your comments. Much appreciated.

[Diane Miller]

The Color Fill layer here is Michael's special use, rather than the usual use he describes first, which is to merely darken the lighter tones or lighten the darker ones, each with a lot of reach into the mid-tones.

A question, though. (It's obvious you are extremely knowledgeable about all this stuff, so not a challenge, just a clarification.) Isn't it simpler to just make the luminosity selection (step 1), and with it in effect then create the Color Fill layer (step 2) -- it will be automatically masked. Then you can tweak the hue and sat as much as you want.

And, if you confine things to one or two Color Fill layers, isn't this 99% the same as using Split Toning? I've tried to do the equivalent of split toning using secondary or tertiary selections (Kuyper's Bright Whites or Dark Darks or whatever he calls them) in order to minimize tonal overlap between, say, warm highlights and cool shadows, and don't see much difference even in third-order selections, which surprises me.

[Michael Gerald-Yamasaki]

A question, though. (It's obvious you are extremely knowledgeable about all this stuff, so not a challenge, just a clarification.) Isn't it simpler to just make the luminosity selection (step 1), and with it in effect then create the Color Fill layer (step 2) -- it will be automatically masked. Then you can tweak the hue and sat as much as you want..

Yep. That works - fewer steps.

And, if you confine things to one or two Color Fill layers, isn't this 99% the same as using Split Toning? I've tried to do the equivalent of split toning using secondary or tertiary selections (Kuyper's Bright Whites or Dark Darks or whatever he calls them) in order to minimize tonal overlap between, say, warm highlights and cool shadows, and don't see much difference even in third-order selections, which surprises me.

If you first create a grayscale monochrome, two color fill layers, one with the luminosity mask and the other with an inverted luminosity mask. Say, 50% opacity, Overlay blend. The result of the three layers would be a good facsimile of a duotone.

Just an inverted fill layer with the luminosity mask is more a color balance thing.

Also, beyond 2 layers... hmmm. Not sure how that would work. There are just two endpoints on a linear scale, since we are beginning the toning with grayscale image. You could play the same masking trick with each individual color channel for additional separation... But thinking about how to combine these to plan the effect makes my head hurt. ;-)

Cheers,

-Michael-

[Anita Bower]

I love the colors and how the fill the frame. Beautiful details in the Hummingbird. The color conversion looks excellent--not fake, even though I know those aren't the original colors. The position of the bird, and the blur of the wings are very nice. I might crop the image to focus on the Hummingbird, or, I'd eliminate the bright pink color of the flowers on the far right, as they pull my eye away from the bird.
I think this should be entered in the weekly theme, as the eye stands out nicely.

[Diane Miller]

It could be like juggling 4-5 balls. I can't do one... And with less overlap between colors it might just get ugly. I think it may be basically what Topaz ReStyle is doing, though.

[Jackie Schuknecht]

The bird looks so real, you can almost touch it! The colour palette is stunning, So well done!