From the course: Photoshop CC 2017 One-on-One: Fundamentals

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Luminance and its relationship to color

Luminance and its relationship to color - Photoshop Tutorial

From the course: Photoshop CC 2017 One-on-One: Fundamentals

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Luminance and its relationship to color

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- In Photoshop and other graphics programs, brightness goes by many names including shade, tone and, my favorite, luminance. In your every day, average RGB image, which is far and away the most common kind of image you'll encounter, luminance is measured in steps known as levels. A level of zero is black, and a level of 255 is white. The other levels, one through 254, represent the progressively brighter shades of gray in between. So where does color come in? Again assuming an RGB image, you have three luminance-only versions of an image called channels. The three channels are respectively colorized red, green and blue, hence RGB, and then blended together to produce the full colored composite. In other words, color is a function of luminance. Meanwhile, luminance and colors sometimes react with each other in surprising ways. Look at a strip of gray values, and you see a steady progression of neutral levels just as you would expect. Throw a cool color like blue into the mix, and the…

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