[Jim O’meara]

Hi,

I know this post is old and your project is well over and done with but I thought I would add a small bit for others coming across it in their future searches.

The Command + Option + tilde(~) (Control + Alt + tilde on the PC) that you mentioned in your post will load luminosity which looks at the brightness of the pixels rather than the highlights of the image. It will give a different result than loading the highlights, so it all depends on what you are after. I don’t know of another way besides the keyboard shortcut to do this.

I use load luminosity and then select inverse to extract subtle shadows.