I wanted to write and thank you for making the luminosity mask tutorial videos. I purchased Tony's Action panel awhile back and kind of understood the concepts, but after purchasing your videos, I am finding out how much I didn't know. They are very well done, and I love that I am able stop and rewatch portions when I need to. I am excited now to start using these methods more.
This course is the most complete resource for all the things luminosity masks, and other pixel-based masks can NOW do. Since my last luminosity mask course, the TK panel has advanced considerably and I have had several years to refine and expand how I use them. It all comes together in the Luminosity Mask Masterclass. Level: Intermediate to advanced. Produced in 2020. Features the TK7 Panel.
TK-ACTIONS panel
NOTE: This free panel is available on the Panels and Videos page. It is NOT a replacement for any of the current V6 modules. It is simply a new panel for people who want a fast and simple way to start working with luminosity masks.
There are many ways to use luminosity masks when developing images in Photoshop. Adding them as layer masks on adjustment layers and painting through active luminosity selections are two common techniques. The Basic V6 panel makes it easy to incorporate these methods into the workflow simply by clicking a couple buttons. The panel is also a great way to to see how easy it is to use luminosity masks since the Rapid Mask engine does all the hard work in the background. Luminosity masks need to be fast and intuitive in order to become a standard part of the workflow. The TK Basic V6 panel makes this possible and is the ideal tool for quickly getting up to speed with their creative potential.
Back in 2006, photographer Tony Kuyper published his first tutorial on luminosity masks. Since then, he has created many more tutorials, PDFs and even his own Photoshop extension panels, which is the subject of this review. As of this spring, Kuyper is now on his fifth major revision of his TKActions Panel for Photoshop. TKActions Panel V5 is one of the most powerful tools you can purchase to enrich your Photoshop experience, and it will save you an incredible amount of time and put a lot of power right at your fingertips.
It can still be a little difficult to wrap your head around precisely what he is describing above, at least it was for me. It becomes immediately obvious when you make your first click on a panel in TKActions Panel V5, however. See the screenshot below.
The TK Control panel provides access to a lot of commonly-used Photoshop tools and features easy accessibility via icons. For example, there's a button to open an image, a button for opening Adobe Camera Raw, there are buttons for black and white brushes, there are buttons for all adjustment layers, saving, making an inverse selection, dodge (creates a new dodge pixel layer with overlay blending mode by default), burn (creates a new burn pixel layer with soft light blending mode set by default), and so on and so forth. It's very useful once you get used to where everything is, and it significantly sped up my workflow.
Looking at the RapidMask panel next, which expands upon the functionality of the Intro panel, there is a lot you can do within the RapidMask panel. I will not go into detail on every aspect of the panel, but it offers considerably more control over masking than the Intro panel. Features that I like a lot are the Infinity and Auto Levels buttons, which are located right next to each other. Infinity allows you to customize a mask through a levels adjustment whereas the Auto Levels button adjusts levels automatically to make the brightest parts of your mask pure white and the darkest areas pure black, which is especially useful when making midtones adjustments, as these often have huge swaths of gray area, which are not as useful for precise adjustments to your images.
There are ways to make additional masks more quickly than you might think looking at the lights, darks and midtones buttons. By inverting a mask, which is achieved quickly by hitting the 'Invert' button in the panel, you can nearly double the number of available masks with a single click. If you're using a Lights 1 mask and you invert it, it's the same as a Darks 1 mask. But, if you invert a Lights 2, 3, 4 or 5 mask, they are not the same as Darks 2-5 masks, for example.
Additional masks are available through the color picker tool, which is in the Midtones mask row. By selecting a color and then potentially expanding it or shrinking it with the color picker add and subtract tools, which pop up as soon as you hit the "Pick" button, you can make a highly precise, custom mask, which can then of course be further modified using the modification tools such as the "Infinity" button mentioned above. Control is the name of the game when talking about the TK RapidMask and TK LayerMask panels.
As has been mentioned already, the panels are customizable and you can organize them as you see fit, whether that involves multiple separate modules, removing one or more of the modules or giving them each their own space. Beyond that level of customizability, the TK Actions module itself has six numbered slots for you to record and save your own actions in Photoshop. Further, it is important to take note of the colored borders and backgrounds in the TKActions Panel V5 modules. They are organized coherently by color, which helped me a lot when learning to use the panels in my own workflow.
For example, there is a spot removal action. Cleaning up files is typically one of the first things you should do to an image. Dust is unfortunately an issue most of us must deal with and there are many ways to achieve good results and TKA V5 offers a quick, reliable method. Not all dust spots are immediately obvious but can show up after you've made adjustments to your image. How do you deal with those in the TKActions V5 panel? When you click the "+/- Dust" button in the TK Actions module, it creates multiple layers automatically, increases contrast and removes color, making dust spots easier to see. And then it's a simple matter of using the content aware heal or clone tools to remove spots. Some spots might still be tough to see, so you can go to the created Amplify Dust layer and then turn on Soft Light or Overlay blending modes and additional spots may become visible. You then have to go back to the Heal/Clone layer to fix the spots, but they should be easier to see. Once you're done, you click the "+/- Dust" button again and your image goes back to its normal appearance.
The TKActions Panel V5 is very fast. I didn't use V4, but based on the list of new features and remarks made by Sean Bagshaw in his video series about the V5 panel, it's clear that a lot of improvements have been made to the performance of the panel in the newest version. Even when dealing with a large, multi-layered 50-megapixel RAW image, the panel updated quickly and offered nearly real-time visual feedback. It's incredible given the amount of tasks that the panel regularly performs that it runs as well and as quickly as it does.
I haven't used TK actions or Lumenzia and it's interesting to hear the pros and cons. I have created my own Luminosity Action Panel called ADPpanel+. I have been using Luminosity Actions for quite a long time and turned my tools into actions and have created a panel.
I'd be interested in hearing your thoughts on it in comparison to the others here. If you want to check out the panel or 3 videos showing the release of my new panel you can find it at the link below.
There is a set of videos on how to use the TK panel and you can review different masks a lot easier than explained earlier. After using them for a while you get a feeling for where to start (Darks 1 or Lights 3, etc) and it is a simple mouse click to change to a different one. I find that luminosity masks are good for subtle changes in photos. A lot of what you do with them can be accomplished in LR or Camera Raw. It was a lot of fun learning about them from the TK website. The tutorials are really good even though you have to pay for them. Not terribly exspensive.
Will keep an eye on the Photoshop Chef panel though, to see if it offers something Raya Pro doesn't. Most, if not all can be done manually but it takes more time. Basically those panels are just time savers. I've made a couple of panels myself.
2.7On 29 February 1996, the Prague High Court (High Court) upheld the judgment of the Regional Court. It changed the decision on costs and ordered the author to refund the legal costs of the defendants. On 19 May 1996, the author brought criminal charges against the members of the court's panel for abuse of public authority under Section 158, paragraph 1(a) and (c), of the Criminal Code. He claimed that they committed a crime by refusing to categorise JD's and TK's actions as wrongful interference with his personal rights.
This study is part of a time-series collection of nationalsurveys fielded continuously since 1952. The American NationalElection Studies are designed to present data on Americans' socialbackgrounds, enduring political predispositions, social and politicalvalues, perceptions and evaluations of groups and candidates, opinionson questions of public policy, and participation in politicallife. This data collection currently encompasses two waves. The firstwave is the 1992 Post-Election Survey. In addition to the standard orcore content items, respondents were asked their positions on socialissues such as altruism, abortion, the death penalty, prayer in theschools, the rights of homosexuals, sexual harassment, women's rights,and feminist consciousness. Other substantive themes included racialand ethnic stereotypes, opinions on school integration and affirmativeaction, attitudes toward immigrants (particularly Hispanics andAsians), opinions on immigration policy and bilingual education,assessments of United States foreign policy goals, and United Statesinvolvement in the Persian Gulf War. The second wave of this panel,the 1993 Pilot Study, was in the field approximately one year afterthe first wave. It reexamined a number of items from the 1992 study togive as complete a picture as possible of how President Clinton wasfaring in the eyes of the coalition that had elected him. It alsosought to explore in more detail the strength and depth of the RossPerot phenomenon and, in particular, the reasons behind his continuedsupport. Finally, this second wave of the panel continued thetradition of all pilot studies in seeking to carry out research anddevelopment work for the subsequent year's election study. In thisregard, the Pilot Study explored the perceived interests of severalgroups (e.g., wealthy, poor, middle class, Blacks, whites) in areassuch as national health insurance, affirmative action, and schoolchoice, attitudes toward homosexuals and about policies affectinghomosexuals, and experiments in the survey response form itself. 2ff7e9595c
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