Subtitles of the Movie

If you have created a selection using one of these tools or a combination of these tools, you done a fair amount of work, and you'll probably want to save that selection, so you can use it a later time. Well of course Photoshop allows you to save that selection. And in order do that, you go to the Select menu and choose Save Selection. And what it does is it brings up this dialog box asking you a few question, or having you make few decisions. If you had another document open, you might be able to choose that if were the exact same pixel dimension. And the way Photoshop saves selections is it actually creates a new channel, called an alpha channel, and adds it to your channel list. I am going to hit cancel for a moment and talk a little bit about channels. Currently I have it a RGB color document. Now what that means is that this image is made up of three channels. One gray scale channel for the red data, one grayscale channel for the green data and one for the blue. And when you combine them all three together, you have what looks like continuous tone color or RGB. But even though you see what look's like four channels here, it's actually three channels, and the top one is a composite channel for our convenience and the way we like to look at images and continuous tone color. So back to saving a selection. If you go Select menu and choose Save Selection, what it does is it adds a new channel to my collection of channels. And I'll just call this 'apple mask' and the operation is, it's going to create a new channel. And here is my apple mask, and notice it's channel number 4. So, this is what Photoshop does when it saves a selection. What it should say perhaps is create a new channel and save that data as a mask. So you can see that this mask is the exact same shape as my selection or marching ants. Think of a mask as a passive selection, or a selection as an active mask. So I can't do anything with this mask right now because it's not a selection, but what I can do is edit this with paining tools and then reactivate that selection. So I am going to go back to my RGB document, and let's say we've made some amazing edits to our picture and we want to do something to it. Using that selection that we saved. Well you saw how I saved the selection. Now that I have an additional mask channel available, I can reload that as a selection, or reactivate that mask as a selection. Select menu>Load Selection and the channel is 'apple mask'. If I had more, I could click on this menu and scroll down to whichever additional alpha channel I wanted to load. And I'll click load that mask OK. Bang! There we are - we have our selection that we saved as a mask, reloaded and reactivated back as a selection.