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389 Chapter 9 ✦ Masks and Extractions 60-pixel soft brush shape, and dragged outward from various points along the perimeter of the skull. As demonstrated in Figure 9-6, combining airbrush and mask is as useful in Photoshop as it is in the real world. Figure 9-5: Dragging with the smudge tool smeared colors from pixels outside the selection mask without changing the appearance of those pixels. Figure 9-6: I dragged around the skull with the airbrush to distinguish it further from its background. Pretty cool effect, huh? Well, if this is not your cup of tea, maybe you can track down a teenager who will appreciate it. 390 Part III ✦ Selections, Masks, and Filters Working in Quick Mask Mode Selection masks give you an idea of what masks are all about, but they only scrape the surface. The rest of this chapter revolves around using masks to define complex selection outlines. The most straightforward environment for creating a mask is the quick mask mode. In the quick mask mode, a selection is expressed as a rubylith overlay. All dese- lected areas appear coated with red, and selected areas appear without red coating, as shown in the top examples of Color Plate 9-1. You can then edit the mask as desired and exit quick mask mode to return to the standard selection outline. The quick mask mode is — as its name implies — expeditious and convenient, with none of the trappings or permanence of more conventional masks. It’s kind of like a fast food restaurant—you use it when you aren’t overly concerned about quality and you want to get in and out in a hurry. How the quick mask mode works Typically, you’ll at least want to rough out a selection with the standard selection tools before entering the quick mask mode. Then you can concentrate on refining and modifying your selection inside the quick mask, rather than having to create the selection from scratch. (Naturally, this is only a rule of thumb. I violate the rule several times throughout this chapter, but only because the quick mask mode and I are such tight friends.) To enter the quick mask mode, click the quick mask mode icon in the toolbox, as I’ve done in Figure 9-7. Or press Q. When I pressed Q after wreaking my most recent havoc on the extinct antelope skull, I got the image shown in Figure 9-7. The skull receives the mask because it is not selected. (In Figure 9-7, the mask appears as a light gray coating; on your color screen, the mask appears in red.) The area outside the skull looks the same as it always did because it’s selected and, therefore, not masked. Notice that the selection outline disappears when you enter the quick mask mode. This happens because the outline temporarily ceases to exist. Any operations you apply affect the mask itself and leave the underlying image untouched. When you click the marching ants mode icon (to the left of the quick mask mode icon) or press Q, Photoshop converts the mask back into a selection outline and again enables you to edit the image. If you click the quick mask mode icon and nothing changes on screen, your com- puter isn’t broken; you simply didn’t select anything before you entered quick mask mode. When nothing is selected, Photoshop makes the whole image open for edit- ing. In other words, everything’s selected. (Only a smattering of commands under the Edit, Layer, and Select menus require something to be selected before they work.) If everything is selected, the mask is white; therefore, the quick mask Note 391 Chapter 9 ✦ Masks and Extractions overlay is transparent and you don’t see any difference on screen. This is another reason why it’s better to select something before you enter the quick mask mode — you get an immediate sense you’re accomplishing something. Figure 9-7: Click the quick mask mode icon (highlighted in the toolbox) to instruct Photoshop to express the selection temporarily as a grayscale image. Also, Photoshop enables you to specify whether you want the red mask coating to cover selected areas or deselected areas. For information on how to change this setting, see “Changing the red coating,” later in this chapter. In quick mask mode, you can edit the mask in the following ways: ✦ Subtracting from a selection: Paint with black to add red coating and, thus, deselect areas of the image, as demonstrated in the top half of Figure 9-8. This means you can selectively protect portions of your image by merely painting over them. ✦ Adding to a selection: Paint with white to remove red coating and, thus, add to the selection outline. You can use the eraser tool to whittle away at the masked area (assuming the background color is set to white). Or you can swap the foreground and background colors so you can paint in white with one of the painting tools. Quick mask icon 392 Part III ✦ Selections, Masks, and Filters Figure 9-8: After subtracting some of the selected area inside the eye socket by painting in black with the paintbrush tool (top), I feathered the outline by painting with white, using a soft 45-pixel brush shape (bottom). ✦ Adding feathered selections: If you paint with a shade of gray, you add feath- ered selections. You also can feather an outline by painting with black or white with a soft brush shape, as shown in the bottom image in Figure 9-8. ✦ Clone selection outlines: If you have a selection outline that you want to repeat in several locations throughout the image, the quick mask is your friend. Select the transparent area with one of the standard selection tools and Ctrl+Alt-drag it to a new location in the image, as shown in Figure 9-9. Although I use the lasso tool in the figure, the magic wand tool also works 393 Chapter 9 ✦ Masks and Extractions well for this purpose. To select an antialiased selection outline with the wand tool, set the Tolerance value to about 10 and be sure the Anti-aliased check box is active. Then click inside the selection. It’s that easy. Figure 9-9: To clone the eye socket selection, I lassoed around it (top) and Ctrl+Alt-dragged it (bottom). ✦ Transform selection outlines: You can scale or rotate a selection indepen- dently of the image, just as you can with the Transform Selection command (covered in Chapter 8). Enter the quick mask mode, select the mask using one of the standard selection tools, and choose Edit➪ Free Transform or press Ctrl+T. (See Chapter 12 for more information on Free Transform and related commands.) 394 Part III ✦ Selections, Masks, and Filters These are only a few of the unique effects you can achieve by editing a selection in the quick mask mode. Others involve tools and capabilities I haven’t yet discussed, such as filters and color corrections. When you finish editing your selection outlines, click the marching ants mode icon (to the left of the quick mask mode icon) or press Q again to return to the marching ants mode. Your selection outlines again appear flanked by marching ants, and all tools and commands return to their normal image-editing functions. Figure 9-10 shows the results of switching to the marching ants mode and deleting the contents of the selection outlines created in the last examples of the previous two figures. Figure 9-10: The results of deleting the regions selected in the bottom examples of Figures 9-8 (top) and 9-9 (bottom). Kind of makes me want to rent It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown. I mean, who wouldn’t give this antelope a rock? 395 Chapter 9 ✦ Masks and Extractions As demonstrated in the top example of Figure 9-10, the quick mask mode offers a splendid environment for feathering one selection outline, while leaving another hard-edged or antialiased. Granted, because most selection tools offer built-in feath- ering options, you can accomplish this task without resorting to the quick mask mode. But the quick mask mode enables you to change feathering selectively after drawing selection outlines, something you can’t accomplish with Select ➪ Feather. The quick mask mode also enables you to see exactly what you’re doing. Kind of makes those marching ants look piddly and insignificant, huh? Changing the red coating By default, the protected region of an image appears in translucent red in the quick mask mode, but if your image contains a lot of red, the mask can be difficult to see. Luckily, you can change it to any color and any degree of opacity that you like. To do so, double-click the quick mask icon in the toolbox (or double-click the Quick Mask item in the Channels palette) to display the dialog box shown in Figure 9-11. ✦ Color Indicates: Choose Selected Areas to reverse the color coating so that the translucent red coating covers selected areas, and deselected areas appear normally. Choose Masked Areas (the default setting) to cover dese- lected areas in color. You can reverse the color coating without ever entering the Quick Mask Options dialog box. Simply Alt-click the quick mask icon in the toolbox to toggle between coating the masked or selected portions of the image. The icon itself changes to reflect your choice. Figure 9-11: Double-click the quick mask mode icon to access the Quick Mask Options dialog box. You then can change the color and opacity of the protected or selected areas when viewed in the quick mask mode. ✦ Color: Click the Color icon to display the Color Picker dialog box and select a different color coating. (If you don’t know how to use this dialog box, see the “Using the Color Picker” section of Chapter 4.) You can lift a color from the image with the eyedropper after the Color Picker dialog box comes up, but you probably want to use a color that isn’t in the image so that you can better see the mask. ✦ Opacity: Enter a value to change the opacity of the translucent color that coats the image. A value of 100 percent makes the coating absolutely opaque. Tip Tip 396 Part III ✦ Selections, Masks, and Filters Change the color coating to achieve the most acceptable balance between being able to view and edit your selection and being able to view your image. For exam- ple, the default red coating shows up poorly on my grayscale screen shots, so I changed the color of the coating to light blue and the Opacity value to 65 percent before shooting the screens featured in Figures 9-7 through 9-9. Gradations as masks If you think that the Feather command is a hot tool for creating softened selection outlines, wait until you get a load of gradations in the quick mask mode. There’s no better way to create fading effects than selecting an image with the one of the gradi- ent tools. Fading an image Consider the U.S. Capitol building shown in Figure 9-12. Whether or not you care for the folks who reside inside—personally, I’m sick of all this cynicism about the gov- ernment, but I’m happy to exploit it for a few cheap laughs — you must admit, this is one beautiful building. Still, you may reckon the structure would be even more impressive if it were to fade into view out of a river of hot Hawaiian lava, like the one to the Capitol’s immediate right. Well, you’re in luck, because this is one of the easiest effects to pull off in Photoshop. Figure 9-12: You can create a linear gradient in the quick mask mode to make the Capitol (left) fade out of the lava (right). 397 Chapter 9 ✦ Masks and Extractions Switch to the quick mask mode by pressing Q. Then use the gradient tool to draw a linear gradation from black to white. (Chapter 6 explains exactly how to do so.) The white portion of the gradation represents the area you want to select. I decided to select the top portion of the Capitol, so I drew the gradation from the top of the sec- ond tier to the top of the flag, as shown in the first example of Figure 9-13. Because the gradient line is a little hard to see, I’ve added a little arrow to show the direction of the drag. (To see the mask in full color, check out the first image in Color Plate 9-2.) Figure 9-13: After drawing a linear gradation in the quick mask mode near the center of the image (left), I hid the image and applied the Add Noise filter with an Amount of 24 (right). Banding can be a problem when you use a gradation as a mask. To eliminate the banding effect, therefore, apply the Add Noise filter at a low setting several times. To create the right example in Figure 9-13, I applied Add Noise using an Amount value of 24 and the Uniform distribution option. In the right example of Figure 9-13, I hid the image so that only the mask is visible. As the figure shows, the Channels palette lists the Quick Mask item in italics. This is because Photoshop regards the quick mask as a temporary channel. You can hide the image and view the mask in black and white by clicking the eyeball in front of the color composite view, in this case RGB. Or just press the tilde key (~) to hide the image. Press tilde again to view mask and image together. Tip 398 Part III ✦ Selections, Masks, and Filters To apply the gradation as a selection, I returned to the marching ants mode by again pressing Q. I then Ctrl-dragged the selected portion of the Capitol and dropped it into the lava image to achieve the effect shown in Figure 9-14. I could say something about Congress rising up from the ashes, but I have no idea what I’d mean by this. For the color version of this splendid image, see Color Plate 9-2. Figure 9-14: The result of selecting the top portion of the Capitol using a gradient mask and then Ctrl-dragging and dropping the selection into the lava image. Applying special effects gradually You also can use gradations in the quick mask mode to fade the outcomes of filters and other automated special effects. For example, I wanted to apply a filter around the edges of the Lincoln colossus that appears in Figure 9-15. I began by deselecting everything in the image (Ctrl+D) and switching to the quick mask mode. Then I selected the Gradient tool, selected the linear gradient style icon on the Options bar, and selected the Foreground to Transparent gradient from the Gradient drop- down palette. I also selected the Transparency check box on the Options bar. [...]... and the Width, Length, and Concavity values in the Arrowheads palette to 400, 60 0, and 20, respectively I selected the End option box to append the arrowheads at the end of my lines (See Chapter 6 if you want more information about working with the line tool options in Photoshop 6. ) 4 Press D to switch to the default colors 5 Draw your line, which shows up in red If you don’t get it right the first time... pixel The increment of change gets larger as you increase the brush size 4 05 4 06 Part III ✦ Selections, Masks, and Filters Photoshop Tip 6 Small brush sizes result in sharper edges Larger brush sizes are better for fragile, intricate detailing, such as hair, foliage, wispy fabric, bits of steel wool, thin pasta — you get the idea 5 If you make a mistake, press Ctrl+Z As I mentioned before, the Extract... Tip You also can click inside a filled area with the fill tool or eraser to remove the fill Photoshop 6 Photoshop 9 Click the Preview button Before you can apply your prospective mask, you need to preview it so you can gauge the finished effect, as in Figure 9-21 6 If you Shift-click with the fill tool in Step 8, Photoshop fills the outline and processes the preview automatically, saving you the trouble... Masks and Extractions Photoshop That’s 99 percent of what you need to know about the Extract command For those of you who care to learn the other 1 percent, here’s a quick rundown of the remaining options that appear along the right side of the Extract window 6 Note that some of the option names have changed in Version 6, but all the functions remain the same as in Version 5. 5 You do, however, have... Pixar, PNG, TIFF, Targa, and native Photoshop — accommodate RGB images with an extra mask channel But only the TIFF and native Photoshop format can handle more than four channels, both saving up to 24 channels in all I generally use the TIFF format with LZW compression when saving images with masks Because TIFF supports layers in Photoshop 6, you aren’t restricted to the Photoshop format for multilayered... three erasers share some common characteristics The next section in this chapter explores the Extract command, which Adobe upgraded significantly in Photoshop 6 Following that, I explain how to generate a mask based on a range of colors in your image Extracting a subject from its surroundings Photoshop Like the background eraser and magic eraser, the Extract command aims to separate — extract, if you will... deleted Use the history brush to restore details that you wish the Extract command hadn’t deleted Photoshop Back in Step 10, I alluded to ways that you can refine the mask within the Extract dialog box In Photoshop 6, you can use the following techniques to touch up the mask before clicking OK to create it: 6 ✦ Drag with the cleanup tool (C) to change mask opacity: Press the number keys to adjust the... want to retain, Photoshop analyzes the situation and automatically deletes everything but the subject In my estimation, though, Extract is only slightly more powerful than the background eraser and several times more complex Some images respond very well to the command, others do not 6 That said, Extract can produce reasonably good results if you get the steps right And in Photoshop 6, Extract offers... Filters Generating Masks Automatically In addition to the quick mask mode and selection masking, Photoshop offers a few tools that automate the masking process — well, automate some parts of the process You still need to provide some input to tell the program exactly what you’re trying to mask Photoshop 5. 5 added a trio of tools designed to select the foreground of an image while cutting away the background:... highlighter tool To delete the entire highlight and start over, press Alt+Backspace Photoshop 6 Navigate as needed If you can’t see all of your image, you can access the hand tool by pressing the spacebar or clicking the hand tool icon You can also zoom by pressing Ctrl+plus or Ctrl+minus, or by using the zoom tool 6 7 Select the fill tool It’s the one that looks like a paint bucket To select the fill . isn’t perfect, but it’s not half bad for five to ten minutes of work. 6 Photoshop 6 6 Photoshop 6 Tip 6 Photoshop 6 6 Photoshop 6 Tip 407 Chapter 9 ✦ Masks and Extractions Figure 9-21: Click the. The increment of change gets larger as you increase the brush size. Tip 6 Photoshop 6 Edge highlighter Fill Eraser 4 06 Part III ✦ Selections, Masks, and Filters Small brush sizes result in sharper. a reasonably careful job, the performance of the Extract command won’t be impaired. Tip 6 Photoshop 6 4 05 Chapter 9 ✦ Masks and Extractions Figure 9-20: After tracing around the portion of the