From the course: Photoshop Masking and Compositing: Fundamentals

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Extracting a mask from a Smart Object

Extracting a mask from a Smart Object - Photoshop Tutorial

From the course: Photoshop Masking and Compositing: Fundamentals

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Extracting a mask from a Smart Object

In this exercise, we're going to mask the kite, that is, the bird, and we're going to move into our larger composition. Working inside the bird image, first thing I want you to do is grab that newest alpha channel, and duplicate it by dropping it onto the little Page icon at the bottom of the Channels panel. And now let's increase the contrast of this channel dramatically, using the levels command. So press Control+L, or Command+L on the Mac. This group of luminance levels here inside the histogram; those represent the darkest colors inside the channel, that is to say the background. And then this little group of very bright luminance levels; those represent the tonal values inside the bird. So I'm going to start by dragging that black slider triangle all the way beyond the first group of spikes right there, and that ends up giving us a black point value of 200. And then I'll grab the white slider triangle, and take it down to beyond the second group of spikes, and we end up with a…

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