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Advanced Masking by Dropping Out Colors - or
Create Masks Using Blend If in Photoshop
category: digital photography and image editing
A quick way to mask almost anything with close to a solid color, say blue sky behind tree-covered hills, for an isolated adjustment, is to drop a color with Photoshops Blend If sliders.
Let's say you're masking that sky I mentioned above. Duplicate the Background Layer and set the original to non-visable; zoom in on the top of the tree-covered hills in your new layer, and double click to bring up the Layer Styles Menu. Leave everything else alone, but change the Blend If dropdown, bottom center, from Gray to, in our case, Blue. Now there are two gradients with sliders, one marked This Layer and the other marked Underlying Layer; move the right hand slider on the This Layer gradient slowly to the left and watch the sky drop away from the trees. You can make the slider fuzzy, if need be, by Alt-clicking and dragging to the right. Try it, and you'll see what I mean.
When the sky is gone, but the trees still look good, click OK. Go to the channels palette, find the channel with the cleanest edge, and make a copy. Scrub the edge on the new copy as needed, using the Dodge and Burn tools set to Highlight and Shadows respectively, then paint a little here and there, and you have your mask.
Killer, very quick. If you need a quick reference on layer masks, see Photoshop Layer Mask Shortcuts - Quick Reference.
He said on 06.29.05 @ 04:13 PM CST
