You know my workflow, Tone, Color, Artistic Effects, right? I preach it all the time and more often than not, I teach how to get better colors through your tonal work first, right? Well, recently, I discovered an incredible use for the Selective Color Adjustment Layer to get better tones.
Wait, hold the phone…
So Blake, now you are telling us we can get better colors through our tones and better tones through our colors? Uh, yeah, that’s precisely what I am saying. Now to blow your mind one more time, you can use color to get better tones, so you can use tone to get better color so that you can get better color from your tonal colorwork…
Not only is that a tongue twister, but it is confusing as all get out! I promise this tutorial will be more straightforward than reading the last sentence of that last paragraph.
What I discovered recently is that you can use the Selective Color Adjustment Layer with a Luminosity Blend Mode to get a ton of control over the tones in your photo. The Luminosity Blend Mode only allows the selected layer to affect the underlying layers Luminance values. So when we use a Selective Color Adjustment Layer set to Luminosity, we get to control the tones in our colors without shifting the hue or saturation of the color.
Source: Selective Color for Better Tones (Video) – f64 Academy
Robert Van Maele Photography 