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In these first few exercises, I'm going to introduce you to the topic of
masking and then we are going to really get into it. We are going to roll up
our sleeves and create some extremely accurate masks, my friends.
So we'll start off and sort of old school, we'll be using the Color Range
command, new and improved inside of Photoshop CS4. Then we'll turn our
attention to the Quick Mask Mode, which is still a useful tool, although its
contribution to the masking process has been somewhat minimized inside a
Photoshop CS4. Thanks to the arrival of the masks palette, and we'll see all of
that stuff over the course of these first few exercises.
I'd like you to open these two images here. One is called Duckbill in tent.tif
and the other is called The planets.psd, which affords us the unusual view of
the Earth as seen from the Earth, pretty interesting I think. We are going to
go ahead and select this hadrosaur that you see right here before you, this
duckbill, and we are going to move him into this other worldly environment
right there. And he is going to become intensely scary, you may recall from the
previous portion of this series, from Photoshop CS4 One-on-One Advanced, this
hadrosaur character is none other than Emperor Scratch. So he is extremely scary guy.
Anyway, let's make him and the idea behind masking is that you are selecting
the image; you are just creating a hyper accurate selection outline
essentially, and you can use that hyper accurate selection to apply color
modifications if you want to, to apply any sort of modifications to an image,
to enhance an image or you can select a foreground image and move it into a
different background and that sort of the pinnacle of masking which is the
reason we are doing it, because that's where you can really see the flaws in
your mask and of course, address those flaws. All right, so how do we go about selecting
this guy? Well it's tempting to whip out the Magic Wand tool or something along
those lines. But don't. Because a much better approach-- let's go ahead and
just select a different tool there so that we know we are not working with the Magic
Wand-- is to choose the enhanced version of the Magic Wand inside of Photoshop,
which is this command right here. Under the Select menu, it's the Color
Range command. It's so incredibly useful that for those of
you who went ahead and loaded Dekekeys, then you have a keyboard shortcut
which is Ctrl+Shift+Alt+O or Command+Shift+Option+O on the Mac and this
is truly Magic Wand 2.0 if you will because it works very much like the Magic
Wand tool does, except it's just better. We could select the hadrosaur, and I could
just click inside of him in order to select various portions of the dinosaur skeleton
here. But where I to do that, we'd only select a little bit here and there
at a time because we've all sorts of highlights and shadows to content with,
whereas our background is fairly homogeneous. So let's select the background
and then switch the selection later to the foreground image instead. So in other
words, we are just selecting the thing that's easiest to select.
Now we are seeing this command here, which is a lot like the Magic Wand tool,
and I'm not lying to you. Even though it doesn't look anything like the Magic
Wand, notice that you have got this little eyedropper cursor that is your wand.
So if you click inside of the image, then you'll select that color that you
clicked on and its neighbors and you can see that the selection is occurring
here inside the Color Range dialog box. So notice that you have got a little preview
of your selection represented as a black and white image, and if you are new
to masking that can be a little bit sort of difficult to come into terms with.
The whole notion that this is a selection tool is a little bit foreign because
it doesn't look like one at all. You will notice that we have white right there,
around the skeleton and then the skeleton itself is black and what that's
telling you, the white regions are the selected areas and the black regions are
the deselected areas and wherever you see, gray is partially selected. So light
gray means it's pretty darn selected, dark gray means its pretty darn
not selected, and 50% gray would mean its right in between.
And so the delightful thing is that you are creating the selection on the fly
here inside of the Color Range dialog box and you haven't committed to the
selection outline, until you actually click on the OK button.
There it is the Color Range command under the Select menu, available to you
anytime that you want to use it, night or day, brings up the Color Range dialog
box which gives you access to the more powerful Magic Wand feature inside of
Photoshop and we'll be learning more about this in the very next exercise.