Layer/Mask question (1 Viewer)

pe'rigin said:

Shaggy,


Let's try channels.

Get your bird image.

Roughly go around the bird with the lasso tool, don't worry about being accurate.

Save that selection UNDER SELECTION, give it the name BIRD Channel.

Go to Channels, you'll see it at the bottom of the menu. A big black oblong with your bird roughly drawn in white.

Click on BIRD Channel.

Your image now has a red mask all over it, except where you have drawn around the bird.

Make sure the Black is in the foreground. Enlarge your image on screen, choose a solid brush and paint around the bird. You'll see that you're 'PAINTING' in Red.

Once correct save, then....

Go back to your image.

Go to Select, load selection BIRD CHANNEL, you now have 'dancing ants' around the bird.

Go to select, choose MODIFY, CONTRACT, put in 2 pixels, OK.

Go to Select, Choose MODIFY, FEATHER, put in say 5 pixels in radius, OK

COPY. PASTE.

Your bird is now copied from the original background on its own layer.

From this point you can do whatever you wish, because you have a saved channel of the bird.

Basically that's it, you should refine things, but let's leave that until another day.

Click to expand...

That's interesting pe'rigin, I do almost exactly the same as this but I use the 'quick mask' tool after making a rough selection with the lasso tool. after refining the mask with a brush I come out of the quick mask and make a new layer from the selection. Is your method any different or is it the same thing arrived at by a slightly different way?

pe'rigin said:

Shaggy,


Let's try channels.

Get your bird image.

Roughly go around the bird with the lasso tool, don't worry about being accurate.

Save that selection UNDER SELECTION, give it the name BIRD Channel.

Go to Channels, you'll see it at the bottom of the menu. A big black oblong with your bird roughly drawn in white.

Click on BIRD Channel.

Your image now has a red mask all over it, except where you have drawn around the bird.

Make sure the Black is in the foreground. Enlarge your image on screen, choose a solid brush and paint around the bird. You'll see that you're 'PAINTING' in Red.

Once correct save, then....

Go back to your image.

Go to Select, load selection BIRD CHANNEL, you now have 'dancing ants' around the bird.

Go to select, choose MODIFY, CONTRACT, put in 2 pixels, OK.

Go to Select, Choose MODIFY, FEATHER, put in say 5 pixels in radius, OK

COPY. PASTE.

Your bird is now copied from the original background on its own layer.

From this point you can do whatever you wish, because you have a saved channel of the bird.

Basically that's it, you should refine things, but let's leave that until another day.

Click to expand...

Thanks pe'rigin.
I'll give that a go when I have some spare time :t:

Shaggy 2070

I think I'm clear on what you're doing. I'd just make sure you have the mask layer selected when you paint back areas you just revealed. If you were revealing areas by painting white, then you need to switch to black and paint on the layer mask to add that area back in. I think that's what you were saying in your initial post.

Roy's right, quick masks are easier(to me) than messing with the channels palette.

Also, whenever you have something that's actively selected, say a kestrel against a blue sky, when you add an adjustment layer, it automatically creates a layer mask attached to it based on your selection that's active at the time.

Then, alt+click on the layer mask to bring up the black and white mask, give it a gaussian blur of 1.0 to 2.0 pixels to soften the edges and you have a mask you can use to sharpen the kestrel, and not the sky, or blur the sky to reduce any noise, and will have no hard edges.

J

Per'rigin,

I do wonder why you do it all in channels rather than using the layers palette? After all Photoshop has had layers since version 4!

Mono

The glib remark would be professionalism, expertise or correct working procedure Mono, but in truth it’s more to do with accuracy and speed.

And I've been using it since it first come out (photoshop).

You may feel that’s a bit pedantic, but you yourself on a daily basis deal with images which you must wonder what on earth these people are doing with their images.

Channel and layers go together as much as cheese and pickle. Each works in different ways to create selections. Selections are ephemeral.

If people are serious about correcting their images properly then Channels are integral to the process.

People should regard channels as subfiles in which you store master selections; they provide some very sophistated way to combine with other selections (Channels, I prefer to call them mattes) that interact with one another to correct imagery.

Correcting images is NOT A global process, all of the problems people encounter with, colour, noise, sharpness, flatness of tonal ranges etc are better dealt with as individual channel combinations.

Adobe Photoshop did not invent colour channels; they have been part of colour photography since its inception. People will learn more from a book written 40 years ago on photographic colour balance than the tripe written today in the magazines and on websites.


With modern day technology all of our imagery should be superb, but alas in a lot of cases it’s no better than what was being produced pre-digital, some worse.

The process I described to produce a channel is the basic procedure I use to get people begin to understand not only channels but layers as well.

It’s pointless for me to spout off technical terms to people, as the grey sea fog soon rolls in for them. I’ve found that if you can get them doing something quickly and achieving a result, then they can progress to a more advance level.