Painting Fine Lines on a Mask – Photoshop Tutorial
This video is not for beginners. Be very clear about this. You need to have enough knowledge of Photoshop to understand and follow the steps in here.
While working with Photoshop, you may need to see the image and the mask you are painting at the same time. Generally, you can see one but to see both of them at the same time, you need some expert advice. That’s exactly what you get here!
The narration is clear but speed of narration is a bit fast. That is why, you need to be a regular Photoshop user to follow the steps instantly. Great tip from expert, watch it to learn something interesting!
Hi, this tutorial is about masks again. What to do when we do have tiny fine lines in your mask. For instance in this example we are looking at a photograph I took of some mice that I embedded.
I actually took three different shots with three different focal points and now I’m combining them into a single image that has all three mice in really sharp focus. Photoshop CS4, which I’m using, can do some of this but I wasn’t happy with the way it masked the middle mouse which is on this layer on the top.
So I made my own mask. If I hold down the Option key that’s Alt PC, and click on it, you can see the mask which I made. It’s just very simple masked out the actual mouse and put a blur on it in case three pictures don’t match perfectly.
But, I cant see the fine fibers around its ears here with there in front of the other mouse that’s behind it. If I zoom in, to about 200% and I’m going to hide the mask by holding down the shift key. You can see the fibers I’m talking about. I’d like to see those because I’m just spiky that way. So, I need to paint them into the mask and wait but I cant do that if I cant see them. I cant see them if I show just the mask and I cant see them if I have the mask working. So what am I suppose to do?
I need to go into quick mask mode, that’s what its called. There’s a button that lets you go into quick mask mode, here at the bottom of the tools panel, but if I click on that, and then start to paint, which you can see I cant see the mask, I just see the painting that I’m doing.
And if I click the quick mask button again, that makes the a.. line that I drew here into a selection. Now I clicked to over to the mask, holding down the Option or Alt key again, and I could fill it but look what happens if I try doing that.
Go to Edit Fill, put the foreground color, ch.. it fills the whole thing because what I actually have masked here… let me see — I can show you, is the entire picture. See where the little —-. That’s now what I wanted. So, going to undo that. I could of course always inverse the selection here. Go to Select, Inverse and I could fill it then. I’m going to do it the easy way now by holding down the Option key and clicking the Delete button that’s a..m.. Alt backspace on the PC. And if I drop the selection sure enough, I have a little white line there and a.. you cant see it because it wasn’t anything particular but that is showing on the mouse here.
But once again I want to actually see the mask while I’m working and I cant do that with that quick mask button. So, I am going to undo this. I’m going to hold down the a.. Option key that’s Alt on a PC and hit command C a couple of times so I can undo a couple of steps.
And I’m going to go back to the image. There is a way to see the mask while you’re working. The way that you do it is you hold down the Shift key and the Option key, that’s Shift and the Alt key on a PC and you click on Mask – . And you can see, I have the red over lay that shows me my mask and it’s perfect except its masking the back which is what the mask is doing and so those fibers are still all hidden. So all I have to do is go over here to image, adjustments, invert and it switches it around and now I can see my fibers really well.
So all I have to do is grab my tablet and a… my paintbrush here. Got the brush and just start to paint those hairs there. I’m going to do a couple of them because they are quite a few here. But as you can see, this is quite easy to do.
And when I finish them all up, all I have to do is invert the mask again. That’s image, adjustments, invert or you can hit Command, Control, I. Hold down the option key and click on the thumbnail… thumbnail, and there it is. And I have my little fibers that I can now see in the image.
Once again, you’re not going to notice this unless you are spiky as I am. But hey, you can use this for other things where you make people to see it more easily. Lets take a look at two of them here I a.. — I made starting point history. There it is. Without them, and there it is with them.
In my snap shot here, you can see. Without and with. And when the whole thing is done, it makes it looks much more like the mouse was actually in photograph that was taken in focus for all three of them. That’s all there is to this and this is Bin Robin Wood. I hope you found this is helpful.
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