From the course: Photoshop CS5 One-on-One: Mastery

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Introducing masking

Introducing masking - Photoshop Tutorial

From the course: Photoshop CS5 One-on-One: Mastery

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Introducing masking

All right gang! Over the course of this project we are going to take this woman with her swinging hair and we are going to composite her against a totally different background and we are going to do so using masking. Now, masking is ultimately the art of using the image to select itself. So, you're taking the luminance levels and transitions that are inherent in the image across one or more channels and you're exaggerating those differences in order to create the final mask. So, for example where this image is concerned, and I'm working inside of Hair in flight.tif, found inside the 26_masking folder. It comes to us from photographer Stas Perov of the Fotolia Image Library. If I go to the Channels panel, which I invite you to do as well, you'll notice in addition to the color bearing channels Red, Green, and Blue, I also have a couple of Alpha channels, non- color bearing channels inside of this image. One is called basic mask and the other is called tougher mask. Now, basic mask…

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