This is a very intuitive and easy to use panel. The look is very clean and it is divided in three different tabs. The first one is for creating and tweaking the muminosity masks. You can restrict or expand the masks and create selections you can then apply with a brush, instantly create curves layers and even create masks based on color range. The second tab is for adjusting precisely your selections and the third tab is to control some of the most used Photoshop functionalities.

I was pleasantly surprised by this panel, and I can highly recommend to users of all skill levels. The panel is not quite as powerful as the TK Panel, but it will make it for most of us photographers. Aaron is constantly making new excellent training material you can find on his website not only for Luminosity masking but also on how to use his panel as a basic work flow tool..
I have read on another website a great tip to make the panel work much fasteby, keeping the properties window closed. As the panel runs through a bunch of adjustment layers during mask creation, it has to refresh the properties window each time which slows it down massively.

The thirs panel is for the finishing touch of your image. You have a fantastic detail extractor with a tonal range selection. Next you have some cool effects such as Soft Glow, the Orton effect and the Frequency separation very useful for both portraits and landscapes photographers.. And finally the resizing and sharpening tools, perfect for exporting to social medias.

This is the final image after 

1. Basic processing in Lightroom to get a neutral balanced image.

2. Applying  a luminosity mask to get a right midtones selection and getting a curves layer to build up the contrast.

3. Adding one more Camera Raw layer to further enhance the contrast. 

This is a very fast and easy process made even easier by creating selections using the ADP Panel from Aaron Dowling.. 

You can get the Panel by visiting Aaron’s website

Here is the image after the basic processing in Lightroom. I like to start with a neutral image that allows building up the light.

As the sky was very flat, I used a replacement sky. To place this new sky, I created a selection of the white sky, created a mak and placed the new one.  I made a mistake as themask did not cover the bottom right part and I had to fix this by painting some white on the mask to reveal the missing part of the sky.

Then I clicked on “Create mask as curves” on the panel.

The next step was to draw a S curve to get the correct luminance for the shadows and highlights.

Final thoughts

 Probably one of the best panels around.. I would say it comes on top alongside Greg Benz’s Lumenzia for both performance and price considering that once you bought it, you get unlimited free updates. I need to mention that Aaron Dowling provides an excellent support if you need. He also provides quite a lot of tutorials.

He is already announcing the version 3 of this panel and it will provide a lot of improvments both in speed and functionality. For sure a 5 stars product.

In the latest issue of Shades of Grey magazine, I tested the Plotagraph animation software. For this specific basic tutorial,  used  quite a simple image to process with only clouds and water moving.

But I wanted to challenge the software a little more by using a much more complex image, a volcano eruption with a lot of lava flowing both in the air and on the ground. By playing the video below, you will see the result is quite stunning as you can have  the exploading lava moving up and the ground lava going down.

Processing steps

Working on an image like this is quite easy with Plotagraph.

First I masked the bottom of the image with the Volcano structure to prevent it from moving.

Then I placed quite a lot of anchor poits as you can see in the image below. The anchor points are blocking the movement on the volcano top.

And at last I placed the animation points going up for the exploding lava, and going down for the ground lava.

I must mention it was done with the iPad app on an iPad Pro. I love using Plotagraph on the iPad more than using the onine app. This is because, the processing on the iPad is instantaneous and you don’t have to wait for the animation being processed on the server and rendered on your computer.

Image from unsplash.com

How to get Plotagraph

You have three choices when you sign up to Plotagraph.com.
The FREE version offers you 500Gb of cloud storage for your Plotagraphs. You can create an unlimited number of projects/animations and you have access to the Plotagraph basic tools. This is the perfect formula to start.
But as you will for sure get addicted, they offer a Pro Membership version of $19,99/month that will add all the Pro tools of the software, the HD resolution to your animations with some animation presets and effects, plus the audio, video and still overlays and1Tb of cloud storage.
And if you get really addicted and plan to use Plotagraph for your business, the Pro+ mambership of$29,99/month will let you go up to 2Tb of cloud storage, the 4K resolution and the Team collaboration tools.

Just go to https://plotagraphpro.com/buynow and sign-up.