Adobe Photoshop CS5 Tutorials
Photoshop Masking Techniques / Quick Mask Mode Techniques
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Subtitles of the Movie (Adobe Photoshop CS5 / Photoshop Masking Techniques / Quick Mask Mode Techniques)
OK, so my Buddha is coming along. It's by no means perfect and it's by no means complete but I'm just kind of, you know, working away on it here and I wanted to show you a couple of quick ideas, a couple of quick things, quick techniques that you can use to help you along and to sort of speed things up in here for you. So you may recall that a lot of the background was selected and I didn't want that area selected so if I hit my Q Key on the keyboard, you can see that my selection is now really getting restricted just to the statue itself. A lot of the background stuff has been knocked away. Let me show you how I did that. I did a couple of different things. First of all, what I did was I cranked up my brush size nice and big, again just using that Close Square Bracket Key on my keyboard. Maybe not that big but about there and I just kind of took out these huge swaths, just kind of big brushstrokes to get rid of that stuff and you know, here's something else that I did too and you're really going to like this is I realized this a few years ago, I realized well, hey, wait a minute. I know that I can fill a selection with color and when I'm inside Photoshop's Quick Mask Mode I can use my Selection Tools, like my Rectangular Selection Tool here. So what you can literally do is even though you're working on a selection, you can make another selection. So literally just drag out this massive rectangle and then, you know, you could hold down Shift and you can add in more areas, taking out these big chunks of background kind of as you go, something like this, right, way down to his shoulder and down his side. You know what I mean? Something like that and then just fill the entire thing with, in our case, red, which in my situation right now, so we want to fill him with black so my black is in the background. So that would be Command Delete. Remember that keyboard shortcut or Control Delete on the Windows side? Or if black is in your foreground, I'll just hit my X Key there, I would hit Option Delete or Alt Delete to fill in that selection. So you can use your Selection Tools inside the Quick Mask Mode, which is awesome. So definitely keep that in mind. Now, let me show you a couple of other new techniques that I sometimes use here. I'm just going to deselect and I'll go back to my brush tool just by hitting the B Key on my keyboard and let me see if I can find a good spot here. I'm going to zoom in on my statue here and I'll reduce down my brush size. Sometimes it's hard to tell, right in here for instance, sometimes it's hard to tell where the statue ends and where the background begins, particularly if you have a shadow like I have in here, right? Or, you know, I noticed this as well further up the side of the statue on his face there with the shadow against the books there, coming off the flash on my camera versus the edge of the statue. I'm not really sure where that edge isright? So either of those locations would be fine. I'm going to go back down here. Here's what I'll do sometimes. Back to my Brush Tool here; is what I'll do is I'll just kind of guess where that edge is. Maybe I'll start down here where I can see the edge and I want to make sure that white is my foreground color, so I'm going to be removing from that red rubilith and all I'm doing is I'm just following this line, see the edge of the statue there, I'm just following that around. I suppose what I could do is I could hit the Q Key and go alright, it continues up against that white book and there's the edge of his hand but I mean, that's going to be a lot of going back and forth, right? So a lot of times I'll just kind of follow that edge all the way around as I go, something like this and then there, I can totally see where the edge of the statue is now against the edge of that, the spine of that white book, something like that. And then what I'll do is then I'll come back and I'll clean this up a little bit. I'll flip back to black now in the foreground and then carefully come back and paint this background back in here. You know what I mean? Something like that? But in any regard, that's just a technique that I use sometimes. You don't have to use it. Or you know, I'm sure as you start using this more and more, you'll start developing your own techniques and you'll find what works for you and what seems to give you the best results, this sort of thing, right? So it's all sort of a matter of feel here. But at the end of the day, it's a great way to again, create selections here inside Photoshop simply by painting them. So I'm going to leave the rest of the statue up to you. I'll catch up with you in just a few minutes and I'll show you what we can then do with our selection. What we'll do is we're going to save the selection. I'll show you how to do that, which converts the selection to something called an alpha channel and then I'll show you how to edit your alpha channel. So sit tight for that. In the meantime, finish up your selection as best you can and don't forget, leave some junk on the inside of the statue. It doesn't have to be perfect. Just the outside sort of contour of the statue is really what we're after.
Tutorial Information
| Course: | Adobe Photoshop CS5 |
| Author: | Geoff Blake |
| SKU: | 34150 |
| ISBN: | 1-936334-46-1 |
| Release Date: | 2010-08-06 |
| Duration: | 7.5 hrs / 95 lessons |
| Work Files: |
Yes |
| Captions: | No |
| Compatibility: |
Vista/XP/2000, OS X, Linux QuickTime 7, Flash 8 |
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