Lumenzia: Refine Masks 

The refinment tools are designed to help improve luminosity masks .you have already created. Often, the initial luminosity masks select too much of the image, and need to be refined by location or color.

Group

This tool allows you to refine masks/adjustments to specific areas of the image. For example, you could use this to help select L5, but only in one part of the image (such as the sky, so as to protect a stream in the foreground from being adjusted).

Note: This video was created before the final shipping version of Lumenzia. The video does not show automatic feathering of the masks that is included with the current version of Lumenzia, but adjusting the feather is still done the same way.

Color

This tool allows you to easily make a mask/adjustment be selective to specific colors. For example, this may be an excellent way to help select a light yellow building in front of a light blue sky. Note: this button was formerly called "color group", but is now just labeled as "color".

Combine

This tool does not change the look of your image, it simply applies a group mask to the layers inside the group. This combines masks together and has a couple of benefits. First, it reduces file size. Second, it makes it much easier to visualize the net effect of the masks (combining and undoing is also an option to visualize the effect without committing to the combined mask). The tradeoff is that this is a destructive change, which may reduce options to refine the mask later.

“Edge” (refine edge)

Opens the refine edge tool with recommended/optimized settings for your image.

“Before”

The "Before" button allows you to do the following:  

  • Compare before and after states of the image by clicking this button. The "before" is the initial state of the document as opened, but you may manually set another history state to be the "before" by <cmd/ctrl>-clicking "Before" while viewing the desired before state. You may return to the default before state by <option/alt>-clicking "Before" at any time.  
  • Paint back to a previous state of any layer mask or pixel layer. Just <<hift>>click "Before" to activate the history brush and set your preferred "before" state as the history brush source.  

Note that Lumenzia will turn red while viewing the before state as a warning not to make changes. It will additionally pop up a warning if you attempt to modify the before image. If you make accidentally make a single change, just use <ctrl/cmd>-Z to undo. If you make multiple changes, there is no way to restore your history, but you can still recover the previous "after" state, which Lumenzia automatically saves for you as a snapshot in history (just go to Window/History and click on the backup snapshot near the top of the list).