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

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Using the Calculations command

Using the Calculations command - Photoshop Tutorial

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

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Using the Calculations command

In this exercise I'm going to introduce you to the Calculations command, which allows you to merge two channels together to create a new alpha channel that will serve as the basis for your mask. I'm still working inside Hair in flight.tif, found inside the 26_masking folder. And the first trick is to figure out which two channels you want to merge together. And here is the way I reason it, you start with a base channel and that would be the channel that provides the best overall contrast, and then you look for a support channel that is as different as possible from that base channel. So, for example, in our case, we already know which channel provides the best contrast. that's the red channel inside of this image. We discovered that in a previous exercise because we have these bright skin tones set against the darkish background and the hair is darker still. So now that we know that it's the base channel, we need to figure out whether the Green or Blue channel is going to be the best…

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