How to select dark/light/medium tones of an image/photograph

trandoductin · **Posted:** Tue Jun 03, 2014 4:20 pm **(#1)**

GIMP Version: 2.8.10
Operating System: Windows
GIMP Experience: Basic Level

Hello Gimp experts.
Long time ago I followed a tutorial on the internet.
In this tutorial, it showed how to select dark/light/medium tones and created layer masks out of them.
So you could change levels/colorize and all sort of stuff with these selections.
It had to do something with channels. It has been a long time and I forgot how to make layer masks that block out all darker/lighter/medium tones.
I tried searching for this tutorial on the net but can't find it anymore.
So if you know how, please share.
Hopefully the subject makes sense so in the future i can find this again.
Thanks in advance.

trandoductin · **Posted:** Tue Jun 03, 2014 5:40 pm **(#2)**

I found it :yes

http://www.gimp.org/tutorials/Luminosity_Masks/

saulgoode · **Posted:** Tue Jun 03, 2014 5:41 pm **(#3)**

While it's not the tutorial to which you refer (as it only appeared on the web five months ago), the following tutorial by Patdavid provides a good description of the technique.

http://blog.patdavid.net/2011/10/gettin ... masks.html

trandoductin · **Posted:** Tue Jun 03, 2014 5:44 pm **(#4)**

great, thanks!
I'll read that one too!

I followed that tutorial, it's great how they create channels out of desaturated channels. But I just want to play with the tonal layers so I created a script that creates all 9 layers for me found here -> http://gimpchat.com/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=10470.
One click and the 9 layers are generated for me, I just have to play with them.