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All right gang! So here I'm working inside of the image called Duckbill in
tent.tif over here in the Channels palette. In case you want to catch up with
me, notice I have this selection outline that I created using the Color Range
command here under the Select menu. And if you are just joining me and you want
to load this selection outline on up, then go over to the Channels palette and
what you do is you go down here to this guy called imperfect and you would
press the Ctrl key or the Command key on the Mac and you would click on its
thumbnail in order to load it up as a selection outline, and then you will have
exactly the selection outline you see me using on screen here.
What I did is I went down here to the bottom of the Channels palette and I
click on this icon and notice it says Save selection as channel. That tells me
that I'll indeed save the selection outline as an alpha channel that's right
ready to go. In case, you are wondering all about alpha channels and everything
else that's going on with channels and masks, and you really want to learn
everything about masking, I have the series that's part of the Lynda.com Online Training
Library. Right now it's called Photoshop CS3 Channels
and Masks, but the beauty of it is 100% of it works the same way in the CS3 as
it does in CS4. So it's all applicable to Photoshop CS4, but there have
been some new things added to CS4, so I'll be showing you some of those as we
look at masking here. But I do want you to know, it goes on for hours. There is
just tons and tons of stuff to learn about masking.
I am going to press Ctrl+Z, Command+Z on the Mac because we don't need to add
that guy, he is already part of the image and you can save alpha channels,
these extra channels here that contain masks along with the image in the TIFF
file format. So TIFF and PSD, the layered native Photoshop document format will
go ahead and accommodate masks. JPEG, no sir, you cannot save an alpha channel
along with a JPEG image, just so you know. All right, so anyway, we got this selection
outline going. It is imperfect, what do we do? Well, one of our options is
to enter the Quick Mask mode and you can enter the Quick Mask mode by clicking
on this little icon down here at the bottom of the toolbox or you can just press
the Q key. So the Q key takes you into the Quick Mask mode, and the Q key takes
you back out, or you can click this button right there to go in and back
out. I say we go in for a moment, and the grand
thing about the Quick Mask mode is that it allows you to paint a selection outline.
So you can edit a selection outline as a mask and all of a sudden basically
the entire program, all of Photoshop, becomes a selection modification
environment. So you can use any of these tools now; not just these guys, not
just the selection tools up here, and not just the commands under the Select menu,
but basically everything that's available to you inside the whole software.
It's always its grayscale compatible then you can apply it to this mask.
So there's nothing particularly quick about the Quick Mask mode or easy about
it either, it's just as tough as full-blown masking. It's just that it's
temporary, so you can get in, you can get out, and I guess that's what so quick
about it. Of course, you get in, you spend like a half-an-hour modifying the
mask and then you get back out that very quick. But here, I'll show you some
quick things to do in the Quick Mask mode. First of all, we have got an overlay color,
which is red. So we are now seeing the mask in red. So in other words, the deselected
areas have a red overlay and the selected areas have no overlay. So we
are just seeing the normal colors on the image. And this is based on an old technology
called rubylith, which was this acetate that had red stuff on it and
you would cut up the red stuff and leave the acetate behind and you would peel
out the areas that you cut with an X-Acto knife, for example. And then that would
serve as your mask for a photographic image, when you are doing stat
camera techniques and so on. Because it was so popular, it's a very common
technique. More than 20 years ago back when I was a lad, I used to actually
do this stuff. It became a sort of defacto standard inside
of Photoshop but you don't have to work with a rubylith. You can change it to
a sapphire-lith for example, because we need to make this overlay blue. And why
do we need to do that, because red on red, this is not going to do us any good,
warm color against warm color does not serve our purposes. So here is what you
do; you double-click on the Mask icon. Now the thing is if you are in the Quick
Mask mode, and you double-click on the Quick Mask icon, it's going to take
you out of the Quick Mask mode, which is crazy. Then you have these options and you can adjust
them to your heart's content. I'll show you in a moment. I'm going to cancel
that. I'm going to go back into the Quick Mask mode. You go over to the Channels
palette and you will see this new alpha channel called Quick Mask in itals
to show you that it's something that Photoshop made and it also happens to
be temporary on the fly mask. Double-click on it and you will stay inside
the Quick Mask mode and we we're seeing the Quick Mask options. Go ahead and
click on this Color Swatch. I want you to change the Hue value to 180, which
is Cyan, and click OK. Leave the other values set as it is. So it's just H
180 click OK. You can change the Opacity if you want to.
I so wished you could preview the setting, try to figure out if it's going to
what you wanted to be, but the only way to preview it is to click OK, which isn't
really a preview; it's an application and there it is. So anyway, it
works beautifully for us, this is good enough. Now then what do we do? Well,
the thing to bear in mind with the Quick Mask is that it's still black and white;
I mean you can see that right here inside the Channels palette. So the deselected
area is black, the selected area is white. It's just that it previews
differently. So we are seeing the black areas shown in cyan and we are seeing
the white areas shown transparent just as raw image essentially, an un-colorized
image. So that means if we want to add to the deselected
area we paint with black, and if you wanted to add to the selected area
you paint with white. So for example, I'll go ahead and get my Paint Brush tool
right there; I want you to do it too. Make sure that your brush is set to something
along these lines, which is to say a Master Diameter of 20 pixels and a Hardness
of 100%. The reason is you don't want to be slopping in fuzzy edges when
you are masking. That's rarely a good idea. You want to be able to observe
the natural edges in the image and paint inside of them.
Let's start painting and notice by the way, if I paint in black, my foreground
color is set to black right there, then I'm painting in cyan like so, and these
become deselected regions. So you can de-select in just all kinds of crazy
patterns like this. And then when you go back out of the Quick Mask mode, sure
enough, those areas are deselected. All right, I'm going to undo that
modification by pressing Ctrl+Z or Command+Z on the Mac.
Actually, I have to press Ctrl+Alt+Z or Command+Option+Z on the Mac a few times
to get rid off all that garbage. Then if I switch my foreground or background
color, so the foreground color is now white like this and I paint, then I'm
painting in selection. So I can give them sort of a selected beard right there
and then I switch out of Quick Mask mode and you can see now that now I have
selected that region. All right, Ctrl+Alt+Z a couple of times, Command+Option+Z
a couple of times on the Mac. All right, here is what I want you to do that
we want to get rid of this line. So let's go ahead and scroll all the way over
to the left, so that I can see the far left side of the image and we are
going to get rid of this straight line by doing this. Press the X key to make
the foreground color black, and now I'll click right there, nice, and then I'll
Shift-click right there, and I just deselected this line. Now you can still see
it but it's now covered with the cyan overlay. Actually in the next exercise,
I'll show you how you make sure that it is totally de-selected and then go
up here and click on this side of the jaw, and then Shift-click right there
in order to paint away that seam as well. In the next exercise, we are going to make
some further modifications by viewing the mask independently of the image,
so that we can really hone in on exactly what we are doing. Stay tuned!