Hour12.Using Masks

Hour 12. Using Masks

What You'll Learn in This Hour:

• Applying Masks

• Using Quick Mask

• Layer Masks

Masks can be your best friends when you're working on a complicated picture. They can also be a darned nuisance, simply because there are several kinds of masks that you can apply to your image, and they do somewhat different things. So you not only have to create a mask, you also have to know ahead of time what you want the mask to do for you, and then you have to apply the right kind of mask.

So, what exactly is a mask? In a sense, any selection that you make is a mask because it permits you to do something that affects only the selected area, effectively masking anything that's not selected. A mask enables you to change one part of a picture, without changing all of it.

You can select a single flower from a picture of a garden, for instance, and change its color , without changing everything else. Masks can cover the part of the picture you don't want to change, much like masking tape covers the woodwork you don't want to paint when you're painting the walls.

The confusion about masks comes from there being so many types. You can have layer masks, mask channels, transparency masks, vector masks, and clipping masks; and there's also Quick Mask. All can be used to isolate an area that you want to protect while you make changes to the rest of the picture. Masks are well worth learning because they can save you a lot of time and effort.