Target and adjust the midtones without using luminosity masks

If you have an image you feel lacks that little extra it often helps to adjust the midtones. To manipulate the midtones in a landscape image is a very powerful way of adding mood and non-linear contrast. The various luminosity mask panels offered today can generate various midtones masks which target specific brightness values in an image.

I do not always generate midtones masks using for example Lumenzia when I want to increase the midtones contrast. Instead, I use a Curves adjustment layer in conjunction with Blend-If. Lets have a look at an example.

I felt that the image below could benefit from more contrast and mood when I was editing it in Photoshop.

I first grabbed a Curves adjustment layer, and made a regular S-curve. In order to avoid a color boost I set the layer to the Luminosity blend mode. When you add contrast to an image colors will become more saturated. The Luminosity blend mode tells Photoshop to only adjust the brightness values and not the colors.

Next I double clicked on the Curves layer to open the Layer Style dialog box. I didn’t want the curves adjustment to alter the darkest and brightest pixels from the underlying layers. By pressing down Alt while moving the outer arrow in the Underlying Layer section of Blend-If it becomes possible for you to split the double arrows and feather the adjustment.

The further in you move the two arrows on either side the narrower you make the adjustment. A narrower section of the image’s midtones are therefore affected. I often prefer to move around all four now split arrows in an attempt to find what will work best for the image at hand.

When happy, you click ‘OK’.

The histogram before and after the adjustment is showed below. As you can see, I have moved the midtones a tad to the left.

The image before and after the midtones adjustment:

You can of course continue to fine tune the adjustment after you have closed the Layer Style dialog box. For example, you can open the Curves and fine tune the curve. If you feel the adjustment is too strong you can reduce the opacity of the curve’s layer.