Adapting Photoshop ‘Channel Masks’ to DaVinci Resolve

Great insight Patrick,

Guess what I am in the same boat, I have been using Photoshop since 15 years now.

The techniques you demonstrated were leading towards the right direction of creating luminosity masks, and I was so excited until the final part where you showed how to create a red channel luminosity-mask by simply selecting red color.

In my opinion the point of using any channel masks is just to create a luminosity-mask; which is nothing but a black and white version of the entire image, which can be used as a mask to perform drastic adjustments and still look completely seamless just because it is not a selection of specific portion of the image where the mask is complete white or black, but a seamless transition between them, so that the mask contains the whole image with all the details/texture still in place, leaving no jitter or harsh borders. Any of the Red/Blue/Green channel is a perfect example of a luminosity mask, now when we create a mask by selecting R/G/B colors in the image, and compare it to the respective R/G/B channel, it becomes clear that these two things are completely different.

By using R/G/B channel masks, I get the luminosity masks which hides/shows/partially-shows different parts of the image with black/white/gray while still containing all the details/texture of the image. The part of the image where I need to target the adjustment can either be completely black/white/gray in the R/G/B channel masks, so I chose the channel mask accordingly and make minute brightness contrast adjustments without losing the details/texture of the mask. And use this luminosity mask along with one more restrictive mask just like what you showed.

This technique is mainly used to blend multiple exposure images together to create a seamless HDR which is hard to distinguish from a single image edit.
But when used to adjust luminance contrast or color contrast or even saturation, the results are simply beyond something that can be accomplished using normal feathered selection masks.

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In Photoshop I rarely move the highlights/shadows/midtone sliders which tend make the overall image flat and muddy. I only use luminosity masks with brightness/saturation/hue adjustments layer.

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If you could show us how to achieve this in part 3 of this series, It would be a game changer!

Thanks,
Abodh

A log image, when it makes my selection difficult, I sometimes try this path, create a tree in the Add Source, only tree of chavese pulling to the fixed tree. Can this be a valid process?. Sorry for my English. https://uploads.disquscdn.com/

Abodh – I’ll take a look at this and see if I can translate it to Resolve 😉

Does anybody know how to replace the blue channel data with the green channel’s data?

Hi Patrick, I think this insight is a little bit confusing, because you seem to be saying that the qualifier with 6-vector red will give you the same selection as the splitter node or the RGB mixer technique. But these obviously give massively different results, so if you’re wanting to replicate Mike’s workflow, you need to stick with the RGB mixer or the splitter.