Any Photo Shop Gurus?

[jgaddy]

If I know a person that wrote PS plugin, I would pay them to write this for me....

Many of you that use ACR are used to how you hold the "alt" key down too see the clipping. You can even turn on the highlight warning and it will show you the areas as well. I know you can;t do it in PS, but I would love to be able to do this in PS. Levels has the same feature when you hold the "alt" key down, it shows which channels are clipping....What I want is a way to convert what has been clipped into a slection or a mask.

If I could get that exact area a selection and mask, you could invert and feather to blend and create higher dynamic range images or at least hold and blend areas that would normally blow out. I run into this issue all the time with exposing the skin tones when the person is wearing a white white or anthing with moderate levels of red.

Anyone have any idea how to accomplish this. Threshold is very similar to what I am talking about...Just need to convert the threshold setting of my needed areas to a selection or mask...

Thanks

[jeffkohn]

Threshold is very similar to what I am talking about...Just need to convert the threshold setting of my needed areas to a selection or mask...

If you can get threshold to show you the pixel you want to select, it shouldn't be a problem selecting them. I'm about to hit the sack so I don't have time to test this, but try it and I think it will work:

Create duplicate layer, add blank layer mask, and use threshold there.

Ctrl+A to select everything, Ctrl+C to copy to clipboard.

Now Alt+Click on the layer mask and Ctrl+V to paste.

From there, changing the mask to a selection is easy, and then you can discard the duplicate layer.

[engstrom]

I have a slight modification on Jeff's procedure that might remove a step. Duplicate the layer, create a threshold adjustment layer. Use Select->Color Range to only select the parts of the picture you want.

[Gordon]

I think ctrl+shift+; basically does this - it'll select all the highlight regions.

Turn that in to a mask - then apply levels to the mask to further reduce the selection, to the level of 'highlights' that you want - change the white point of the mask to increase the clip, change the greypoint of the mask to vary the gradient on the edge. - if you adjust it correctly you'll get just the blown highlights - you can do this by the numbers by settting the selection to just 254 and above, but realistically you actually what a feathered mask, otherwise when you blend it'll be obvious.

If you you use 'Select-> colour range' and then in there select 'highlights' as the 'colour' you can get roughly the same effect too. (yes this is as screwy as it sounds - select colour range has shadows, midtones and highlights as 'colour ranges' for selection. ctrl+shift+; is basically just a shortcut for select :colour range :highlights

I use it a lot when blending two images, one exposed for highlights, one for mid-tones/ shadows, to create the interstitial blending masks