Adobe Photoshop CS5 Tutorials
Photoshop Masking Techniques / Another Method for Initiating a Mask
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Subtitles of the Movie (Adobe Photoshop CS5 / Photoshop Masking Techniques / Another Method for Initiating a Mask)
Alright, now you and I have been talking about Layer Masks and we're just kind of getting warmed up with the idea of layer masks and how they work. They again are very, very similar to the Quick Mask Mode. Now, maybe not initially but once you really start working with them you realize hey, it's practically the same thing. It's just all based inside the Layers Palette now; hence the name Layer Mask, right? So initially you saw how to create a very simple layer mask just by painting. It was very straightforward. I want to show you another method for initiating a layer mask and of course we want to try and isolate this blue toy truck here on the right-hand side of our image. This time I think what I'm going to do is I'm going to get started by using a selection. So what I could do I suppose is I could use my Quick Selection Tool or my Magic Wand Tool or I could even maybe use my Magnetic Lasso Tool or my Freehand Lasso Tool to select out this guy. Essentially that's what I want but I think what I'm going to do here is I'm going to do something a little bit different here. First of all, what I'm going to do is I'm going to double click on my background layer to switch him back to a regular, old Photoshop layer and instead what I'm going to do is I'm going to try and select the background and then what I'll do is I'll minus out the other two toy trucks. Hopefully this will play out here. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to use my Color Range Command for this by the way. So up to the Select Menu and then down to Color Range. We saw this guy earlierright? And what I'm going to do is I'm going to click in the background of my, of my photograph here, something like this and once again, you might want to play around a little bit with your Fuzziness Slider. What I'm trying to do is lower the background and try and get as much of the vehicles as I can. Maybe something like this or, you know, I could even, well, no, I can't really drop them any further than there. I think that's going to be alright for us. OK, go ahead and click on OK. OK, so we have the background selected here and as I say, I want to get rid of the two other trucks, the yellow truck and the red truck so here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to grab my Rectangular Selection Tool and I'm going to hold down the Shift Key because what I want to do is I want to add these other trucks to the selection. So quite literally I'm just going to throw down some of this massive rectangular selection, something like this and then maybe just a little bit there to get the little bits of the yellow truck there. It doesn't have to be perfect or anything. Something like this I think is just fine here. OK, now next up what I want to do is I want to convert this selection to a layer mask and I'm going to do so from the Layer Menu. So up to the Layer Menu here and then down to Layer Mask and we have a bunch of options here. We have Reveal All, Hide All, Reveal the Selection, Hide the Selection or here's a new one in CS5, From Transparency, which is pretty handy. So what I'm going to do here is I'm going to say Hide the Selection. Now, what that does is that creates for me a layer mask. You can see there inside the Layers Palette we get the exact same setup that you and I had previously. There's my Layer Mask Thumbnail and because we chose Hide Selection, the entire selection essentially is filled with black or the entire selection is now transparent down inside our document window. Wonderful. So now all we need to do, if I zoom in here a little bit, is you can see I need to make some adjustments here to my toy truck and I'm going to do so using the Paintbrush Tool. So back to the B Key on my keyboard and I'll make sure that the foreground color at the bottom of my Toolbox is black and then essentially what I'll do is I'll paint in the areas that I want to get rid of and I'm just kind of doing a, sort of a simplistic job at this point. And then of course the bumper and the fender, sort of the trim there did not get selected either so I'm going to have to fill those areas with white. So I'll hit the X Key here on my keyboard and then repaint in those areas. So sort of like we did with the Quick Mask Mode and our Buddha statue, I'm going to leave it up to you to get a perfect selection here for our toy truck and the trickiest part, at least what I'm seeing here, is getting around the tires and around the bottom, the sort of undercarriage of the toy truck. So I'm going to leave that up to you and I will catch up with you in just a minute.
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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