Tips and Tricks: Chicago web design, copy writing, graphics, digital photography, database design, working with people, and getting a web project up and running.

Mask from Image Made Easier  - or

Selectively Invert with the Paintbrush in Photoshop

category: digital photography and image editing

If you're creating a mask in Photoshop using a copy of the image itself, you might increase the contrast of mask layer with levels, run the High-Pass filter, and then increase the contrast again, hoping for nice black edges with a white glow around them. Unfortunately, what you get most of the time is 80 percent black against white and 20 percent white against black, or the reverse.

You can always select the inconsistent 20 percent, chunk by chunk, and invert it, but I find that this is harder than it sounds except in very large chunks. Try this technique, particularly for the smaller inconsistent areas; set the paintbrush blend mode to Difference and paint your mask with white. Wherever you paint and only where you paint, your mask is inverted.

If your masking the sky, or something else that contains a lot of one color, try dropping out colors with the Blend If sliders.

He said on 04.14.05 @ 05:14 PM CST