Working in Quick Mask Mode

The most straightforward environment for creating a mask is the Quick Mask Mode . In the Quick Mask Mode, a selection is expressed as the rubylith overlay you saw in Figure 4-2. All deselected areas appear coated with red, and selected areas appear without the red coating. 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.

How Quick Mask Mode works

Typically, you at least want to rough out a selection with the standard selection tools before entering the Quick Mask Mode. For example, at the top of Figure 4-3, the Pen tool was used to select a portion of the wolf's face, leaving holes in the selection for his eyes. The selection was then inverted by choosing Select Inverse (Ctrl+Shift+I for Windows and z -Shift-I for the Mac) so that the eyes and rest of the face were selected. After your selection mask is roughed in, you can concentrate on refining and modifying your selection inside the quick mask, rather than having to create the selection from scratch.

image from book
Figure 4-3: The marching ants -style selection (left) shows that the eyes and most of the head are selected. Clicking the Quick Mask Mode icon instructs Photoshop to express the selection temporarily as a rubylith overlay (right).

To enter the Quick Mask Mode, click the Quick Mask Mode icon in the Toolbox or press Q. You can see the red overlay covering the portions of the face that are masked off.

You can see that the selection outline disappears when you enter the Quick Mask Mode. The outline temporarily ceases to exist and any operations you apply affect the mask itself, leaving the underlying image untouched. When you click the marching ants mode icon (to the left of the Quick Mask Mode icon) or press Q a second time, Photoshop converts the mask back into a selection outline, enabling you to edit the image once again.

Note  

If you click the Quick Mask Mode icon and nothing changes on-screen, your computer 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 editing. In other words, everything's selected. (Only a smattering of commands on 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 overlay is transparent and you don't see any difference on-screen.

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. 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, as demonstrated in the top half of Figure 4-4. Assuming the background color is set to white, you can use the Eraser tool to whittle away at the masked area. Or you can swap the foreground and background colors so that you can paint in white with the Brush tool.

    image from book
    Figure 4-4: A soft-edged brush enlarges the selected area (left). In Quick Mask Mode, use the Brush and Smudge tools to accent a feature of your images, in this case, a wolf's face (right).

  • Adding feathered selections: If you paint with a shade of gray, you add feathered selections. You also can feather an outline by painting with black or white combined with a soft brush shape, as shown in Figure 4-4. Here, we're painting in white with a soft-edged brush, adding a nice feathered edge to the top of the selection. Then, after reentering the world of the marching ants, a little painting and smudging creates the image on the bottom of the figure.

  • Cloning 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, press and hold Ctrl+Alt ( z -Option on the Mac), and drag it to a new location in the image, as shown in Figure 4-5. Although the Rectangular Marquee tool is used in the figure, the Magic Wand tool also works well for this purpose. To select an anti-aliased selection outline with the Wand tool, set the Tolerance value to about 10 and be sure the Anti-aliased check box is active before clicking inside the selection.

    image from book
    Figure 4-5: To clone a selection, marquee-drag around it, press Ctrl+Alt ( z -Option on the Mac) (left) and drag it into a new position relative to the original selection (right).

  • Transforming selection outlines: You can scale or rotate a selection independently of the image, just as you can with the Transform Selection command. Enter the Quick Mask Mode, select the mask using one of the standard selection tools, and choose Edit Free Transform or press Ctrl+T ( z -T on the Mac). See Chapter 5 for more information on Free Transform and related commands.

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 not yet discussed, such as filters and color corrections. We'll see how a few of these more advanced techniques work later in this chapter.

After you finish editing your selection outlines, click the Standard 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.

Tip  

The Quick Mask Mode offers a splendid environment for feathering one selection outline, while leaving another hard-edged or anti-aliased. Granted, because most selection tools offer built-in feathering 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 how your actions affect the selection ” which is something the marching ants aren't capable of.

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 channel in the Channels palette) to display the dialog box shown in Figure 4-6. The Quick Mask Options dialog box has the following options:

image from book
Figure 4-6: The Quick Mask Options dialog box lets you change the color and opacity of the protected or selected areas when you view it in the Quick Mask Mode.
  • 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 deselected areas in color.

    Tip  

    You can reverse the color coating without ever entering the Quick Mask Options dialog box. Simply Alt-click (Win) or Option-click (Mac) 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.

  • Color: Click the Color icon to display the Color Picker dialog box and select a different color coating. You can lift a color with the eyedropper after the Color Picker dialog box comes up; just keep in mind that 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 naturally makes the coating absolutely opaque .

You can also change the color coating to suit your needs. Typically, you want a balance between viewing and editing your selection and viewing your image. But you may have other motivations. Case in point, Photoshop's default settings ” which work just fine for most people in daily usage ” do not translate well when printed here as screenshots of the interface. So, before shooting the screens featured in Figures 4-3 through 4-5, I actually had to raise the Opacity value to 65 percent.

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 by selecting an image with the Gradient tool.

Fading an image

Here the goal is to show you how to create a gradient mask to fade part of an image into nothingness . Figure 4-7 shows a handy biology class skeleton on the left, which will fade in from the ground up onto the stormy plain over on the right. To do this, follow these steps:

image from book
Figure 4-7: In this section, a linear gradient is used in Quick Mask Mode to make the skeleton (left) rise from the stormy plain (right).
  1. Switch to the Quick Mask Mode by pressing Q.

  2. Create a linear gradation. Use the Gradient tool (which you can get by pressing the G key) to draw a linear gradation from black to white. The white portion of the gradation represents the area you want to select. To select the top portion of the skeleton, draw the gradation from just below the ankle to just below the knee, as shown in the first example in Figure 4-8.

    image from book
    Figure 4-8: After drawing a linear gradation in the Quick Mask Mode over the bottom of the image (left), hide the image and apply the Add Noise filter with an Amount of 10 (right).

  3. Eliminate the banding effect. Banding can be a problem when you use a gradation as a mask. To eliminate the banding effect, apply Filter Noise Add Noise at a low setting one or more times. To create the example on the right in Figure 4-8, the Add Noise filter is applied using an Amount value of 10 percent and the Uniform distribution setting.

    Tip  

    In the example on the right in Figure 4-8, the image is hidden so that only the gradient 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 gradient 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 gradient mask and image together.

  4. Apply the gradation as a selection. To do this, return to the marching ants mode by again pressing Q. Then Ctrl-drag ( z -drag on the Mac) the selected portion of the mask and drop it onto the stormy plain, as seen in Figure 4-9.

    image from book
    Figure 4-9: Select the upper portion of the skeleton using a gradient mask and then Ctrl-drag ( z -dragging on the Mac) and drop the selection onto the plain. More tweaking creates a rather Bergmanesque tableau.

  5. Tweak to your heart's content. For example , not content with just that, I pressed Ctrl+T ( z -T) to enter the free transform mode. Then I scaled and distorted the image by Ctrl-dragging ( z -dragging) the corner handles (see Chapter 5). I also enhanced the skeleton by adding an outer glow, and then brought in five little unfaded copies of the skeleton to stand in awe before the big guy.

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, to the following steps show you how to apply a filter around the edges of the image that appears in Figure 4-10:

image from book
Figure 4-10: This time around, you'll surround the foreground image with a gradual filtering effect.
  1. Deselect everything in the image. You do this by pressing Ctrl+D ( z -D on the Mac) and switching to the Quick Mask Mode.

  2. Select the Gradient tool and select the linear gradient style icon in the Options bar. You also want to select the Foreground to Transparent gradient from the Gradient drop-down palette and turn on the Transparency check box in the Options bar.

  3. Make the foreground black. Press D to make the foreground color black.

  4. Create a series of short gradations. Drag with the Gradient tool from each of the four corners of the image inward to create a series of short gradations that trace around the focal point of the image, as shown in Figure 4-11. (As you can see, the image is hidden so that you see the mask in black and white.) Because the Foreground to Transparent option is selected, Photoshop adds each gradation to the previous gradation.

    image from book
    Figure 4-11: Inside the Quick Mask Mode, drag from each of the four corners with the Gradient tool (green arrows) and apply the Add Noise filter (in this example, set to 10 percent) to create your special effect.

  5. Jumble the pixels in the mask. You do this by applying Filter Noise Add Noise with an Amount value of 10 percent.

    Note  

    What if you want to select the outside of the image, not the inside? You need the edges to appear white and the inside to appear black, the opposite of what you see in Figure 4-11. No problem. All you do is press Ctrl+I ( z -I on the Mac) to invert the image. Inverting inside the Quick Mask Mode produces the same effect as applying Select Inverse to a selection.

  6. Create an atmospheric effect. Switch back to the marching ants mode by again pressing Q. Next, to get the atmospheric effect you see at the top of Figure 4-12, choose Filter Render Difference Clouds ” with the foreground and background colors set to shades of green and yellow.

    image from book
    Figure 4-12: The Difference Clouds effect creates the green haze (left). I've added lightening bolts from another image to a new layer, and used the selection to remove its center (right). The new layer's opacity is 50 percent.

    Tip  

    The corners of the mask used in Figure 4-12 are soft and rounded, but you can achieve all kinds of corner effects with the Gradient tool. For harsher corners, select the Foreground to Background gradient and select Lighten from the Mode pop-up menu in the Options bar. For some really unusual corner treatments , try out the Difference and Exclusion brush modes.



Photoshop CS2 Bible
Photoshop CS2 Bible
ISBN: 0764589725
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2003
Pages: 95

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