From the course: Photoshop Masking and Compositing: Fundamentals

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Converting a channel into a mask

Converting a channel into a mask - Photoshop Tutorial

From the course: Photoshop Masking and Compositing: Fundamentals

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Converting a channel into a mask

In this exercise, we're going to take that ideal base channel, which we've decided is Blue, and we're going to transform it into a highly accurate mask. I'm still working inside that file Glancing model.jpg, found inside the 08_everyday folder. As you may recall, when you're masking an image, the portion that you want to select needs to be white, and the area that you don't want to select needs to be black, which is exactly the opposite of what we have going here. So I've gone ahead and selected the Blue channel inside the Channels panel. I'll reverse the luminance by going up to the Image menu, choosing Adjustments, and then choosing the Invert command, or pressing Control+I, or Command+I on the Mac, which gets us pretty close to the mask we're looking for. Here is the problem though: I just applied that change to a color bearing channel, so if I switch back to the RGB image, you can see that I've pretty well ruined it. And so the moral of the story is, leave your color bearing…

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