It s raining outside. You re quite comfy in front of your computer, working on an assignment to colorize a black-and-white group photograph of 34 mariachis. You ve spent the last half- hour carefully outlining each one of their pants, tunics, and sombreros with the selection tools. You re about to apply the Hue and Saturation command to simultaneously color all of their costumes a brilliant turquoise. You hear thunder in the distance. The lights flicker. Your screen goes dead!
You re not worried; you ve been regularly saving your work. You restart your computer, launch Photoshop, and open the image. The 34 mariachis are there, but without the precious selection marquees over which you labored for so long.
More than a half hour of work has just vaporized into pixel dust. Before you utter a stream of unprintable obscenities, however, remember that you ve learned a valuable lesson: Save your selections! In this chapter, you ll explore some great methods of making and saving selections. This chapter will cover:
Creating alpha channels
Looking at the Channels palette
Editing alpha channels
Performing channel operations
Using Quick Mask