Textures and masks in Photoshop

I've been doing some textures work that I might talk about in a future post. I could do a tutorial, but instead, I'll point you in the direction of a really great tutorial written by Joshua Johnson found on Design Shack. Check it out.

Layer adjustment masks for the lazy artsy slob

When it comes to masking, those extra neat and precise detail-oriented types have the clear advantage. But if you're more the sloppy, intuitive, artsy type, and/or you're a beginner then rejoice! This tutorial is for you. Oh, the discipline that masking requires! This is probably one of the reasons that my personal projects involve fairly minor post-processing manipulation. Mastering all of the selection tools (I have a particular fear of the reputedly wondrous pen tool.), loading alpha channels, altering blending modes...it's just so much to learn that I won't even pretend to cover it all by the end of the month. We'll get to some of it (alpha channels is coming soon), but for today, I want to bask in the relative ease of basic adjustment masking. In particular, the kind of masking that doesn't require precise borders. Here it is in three steps:

1. you open your image
2. you add an adjustment layer such as curves, hue/saturation, etc.
3. you use a very soft brush and paint effects in or out in your sloppy, intuitive way.

Maybe you already know the joys of this kind of masking, but then again, maybe you were just avoiding masks altogether and weren't aware that you had such an easy option.

So let me give a basic example.
Some people might call this the "painting with light" technique. I'm not a fan of the term, because it makes me think of Thomas Kinkade "painter of light." No offense if you're a fan of his (obviously a lot of people are or he wouldn't have stores in your local mall), but those cottages of his always have such intense light emanating from the windows that I can't help but think I am witnessing either an alien abduction or a terrible fire.

But back to "painting with light."
Let's take this pretty lame photo of the pont Alexandre III:


It's no prize to begin with, but if it was the only one you had and you wanted to make your friends green with envy over your trip to Paris then some retouching could help further your sadistic aims.

Now I'll add a curves layer:
Click on the curves icon at the bottom of your layers palette, or in CS4 you can click on the little "s-curve" icon.

Now let's lighten the whole image by taking that black dot and pulling it toward the upper left corner of the curves box:You will see the effect over the entire image because you haven't done any masking yet. With the curves adjustment layer, you automatically get a white mask, which means that any adjustments you make will be applied to the whole image. If you use a black paintbrush on the mask, you can selectively remove the effect. It's just a matter of preference, but I think it's way more fun to use a black mask and the selectively paint in the effect. The only advantage is psychological—brushing the effect in feels more magical whereas brushing the effect out just feels like cleaning up a mess (at least that's how I see it). So dump that white layer mask (click and drag on the mask part—NOT the curves side or you'll trash the whole layer) in the trash:

Yes. Delete. Now alt click on the mask icon to get a black layer mask.

You will just see the dark original...
but by taking a brush (b) and painting white in the mask you can add the light back in as you please. Use the right and left brackets to change the size of your brush and use them with shift to change the softness. For this kind of sloppy intuitive work, I set the brush hardness to zero to avoid strong edges to my changes. You can also adjust the opacity of your brush strokes up in the brush toolbar.

Here's some sloppy painting in action:

Hit the backslash key (\) to see your masking as a red overlay:

You can toggle back and forth or just paint in the overlay view, whatever works. Some more quick painting—and really, this is quick and sloppy but it works—and you've lightened up the bottom:

Remember that this isn't about making one uniform mask, you can change the opacity and make more subtle little blobs of change....

Keep following this process (adding adjustment layers and masking their effects) on as many layers as you want. For example, I think the sky could be less washed out, so I'll add another curves layer and pull the curve down toward the bottom right corner to make everything darker:

It looks like you just undid all of your previous work, but in a minute you'll be painting the effect in and out as above. Once again, I prefer to trash the white layer...


and change to a black layers mask as before.


Mask away....
Notice that I'm not trying to be super precise selections. Instead, I'll use a low opacity brush to feather the effect a little for smooth transitions. I will also take some of the effect off of the clouds to keep them fluffy white.

You can now see the two curves layers...
but since this is a picture of France, two just feels too....too...how you say...conventional. Three is much more interesting.
A little more contrast selectively applied spices things up. And if you think you've gone too far with any one layer, you can always reduce the opacity.

By this point, I'm done, but you could add as many layers and adjustments as you want.
Finally, then, with no adjustments other than our three curves layers, you go from the "meh" photo...
to the "aahhhh" photo:

Closing words...

• use this technique on anything from landscapes to people's faces
• you don't need surgical precision to make artful changes
• if you have never tried adjustment layers and masks, this "sloppy" intuitive way is the least intimidating way to start.
  

Quick tutorial about the Photoshop Quick Mask

Making perfect selections is difficult no matter what tool you use: the magnetic lasso, the magic wand, the quick selection tool, and many others, which is why the Quick Mask is your friend.

Just know up front that "Quick" is a cruel misuse of an adjective meant to taunt you as you painstakingly refine your selection. Best to overestimate how much work it will be to make a good selection, then you can be happy if it doesn't take too long.

Now that I've crushed your optimism, let's move on to a very basic look at the Quick Mask. The quick mask is a nifty red semi-opaque overlay (by default, change color or opacity by double clicking the quick mask icon) that lets you see what you have selected and allows you to make and refine selections. The quick mask tool icon is hiding down there at the bottom of the toolbar:

Or you can find it in the select menu:

Here is a typical way that you might use the quick mask. Let's say that you want to isolate some element of a photo from its background. In this case, let's say I want to take an ornamental ironwork detail, extract it from its background, and save it to use as part of my own brush set or for some compositing project.

For the sake of demonstrating how the quick mask can be used to refine a selection, I will make a really sloppy initial selection with the magnetic lasso tool:

Your selection would never be this bad, but I want to show you that even if it is, you can fix it in a very intuitive coloring-book sort of way. Without deselecting anything, hit "q" to enter quick mask mode (or select it from the toolbar or menu). The red mask lets you see which areas are selected and which are not.

Now that you're in quick mask mode, you can use the paint brush (or pencil or selection tools, but we'll stick with the paint brush here) to refine your selection. Hit "b" to get your brush. As you paint, you can increase and decrease the brush size as needed with the right (bigger) and left (smaller) bracket tools. You can adjust the hardness of the brush (for harder or softer edges) by holding shift while using the right (harder) and left (softer) bracket tools. You can hit "x" to toggle between black or white (i.e. masking or unmasking). Finally, you can toggle between quick mask mode and your selection (the "dancing ants") by hitting "q", but be careful not to click on the image (and accidentally deselect) when you're not in quick mask mode.

It's simple, but it takes time. Things that help: a steady hand, painting or drawing experience, a pen tablet, a zen-like mindset. Sadly, I have, at most, only two of those things.

A detail (above) shows the area that I am painting (with a black brush).

As I work, I hit "q" to check how the selection is progressing. Still work to be done...


I gradually work around the whole thing. Here's the improved version in quick mask mode:

And here is what it looks like when I hit "q" again to turn off the quick mask and go back to my selection.
It's still not perfect, but I have a movie to catch. Priorities. So with my selection still active, I copy it onto its own layer (Mac: Command–J; PC: Ctrl–J):

As you can see, there are still some parts with too much black around the edges. From here, I can use the erase tool to clean it up. If you do a better job up front than I did here, you might already be done.

If you have never used quick mask, just experiment with it (preferably on something with clean edges). Have fun. More work on selections/masking/compositing to come.

March Monthly Special: Masking

I have a love/hate relationship with masking and compositing in Photoshop. On the one hand, I love how layer masks can be used to make selective adjustments to an image. On the other hand, I really hate compositing. Thanks to the ridiculous representation of image manipulation in movies and TV shows, most people think that completely changing a face or an environment is a click or two away. The nightmarish result of that attitude happens when I do a group portrait of a large family (or worse, a massive family reunion) and the client wants me to composite Suzie's head from photo 1 with Joe's from photo 3, Jim's from photo 4, Mary's from photo 8—oh, and while you're at it, could you swap out the eyes on Bob, Jane, and Dave? And the baby would probably look better if you turned its head 30 degrees to the left. I cringe just thinking about it.

I hate compositing, but knowing how to do it comes in handy. Look at my banner, for example. I wasn't about to actually take a photo of a bunch of photos being dropped into a take-out box that just happened to have my photo logo on the side. So I used masking and compositing to get the photo I wanted.

I mask way more frequently than I composite. When I whiten teeth, for example, I do an overall image adjustment, add a black mask, and then use a white brush to paint in the effect on the teeth. That kind of fairly casual brush-in masking is the least tedious. Other cases require complex selections. Here's a quick example of a not-so-complex selection that will make the principles clear to readers who are not in the habit of using masks:

In the above photo (part of an ABC Paris project I have been expanding lately), I want to bring out the sky a little more. That's easy enough to do with a curves layer:
I pull the curve down and get a darker sky, but here's the problem: the architectural portion of the photo is already pretty dark. Any darker and it will lose all of the shadow details, which is pretty much a cardinal sin for most photographers. What to do? I don't want the shadow detail police knocking on my door, but I do want a more dramatic sky. Here's where the mask comes in.
When you add a curves adjustment layer, Photoshop has already assumed that you want a mask to go with it. The default mask is white, which means that the adjustment is going to show everywhere by default. Click on the mask and paint in some black, however, and you can mask out the adjustment. In fact, it's not about black and white, you can mask with shades of gray (i.e. at a lower opacity) for even more control. But in this example, I just want a clean mask: black out the building and leave the curves adjustment for the sky only.

Since this isn't meant to be a full-fledged tutorial, let me just give a quick rundown of the process: With the image layer active, I used the magic wand tool (which is way more fun than, say, the pen tool, because hey! it's magic) to create a selection (look for a post on selections soon).

Once the dotted lines commonly known as "dancing ants" indicate that I have the building selected, I make the mask part of the curves adjustment layer active. Even though I made the selection on the background layer, I can use the selection on any layer as long as those ants are still dancing. Next, I simply use the paint bucket tool to dump black into the selection.

And that's it. My sky is now more blue. I went from this sky:
to this sky:
without changing the building in any way.

That's just a simple example of how masking can help. I could spend a whole year doing masking a compositing tutorials, but then I'd have to spend the next 5 in an asylum. So, in order to keep what's left of my sanity, I will do a few this month but will also do some completely unrelated posts. For those of you brave few who want to share by linking back to this post, do some masking and/or compositing and show us your work. (the FAQ explains how)

NOTE: I changed this month to masking only. (4/5/10)