Using Quick Mask mode

Once we've made a basic selection, we can refine it a bit using the Quick Mask mode. This takes the selection and turns it into a visible mask that can be touched up with any of the painting tools. You'll see here the rough selection made in the previous movie. If you skipped that movie, go back and learn how to use the Quick Selection tool. I'll press the Q key for Quick Mask, and you'll see that a Rubylith Mask is generated. Rubylith is the color that was used in traditional printing and masking for the print industry for several years, and Photoshop uses that color by default.

If you don't like it, a quick double-click there will bring up the Quick Mask Options and allow you to assign the Opacity and the Color. I'll go ahead and turn that on again, or press the Q shortcut to load it. Let's go ahead and zoom in here a bit, and this is actually a great time to bring up the Navigator panel. I'll just tear that off and leave it up here in the corner, and this let's me zoom in and start to massage the mask. That looks pretty good there, and I'm just going to grab the Blur tool and feather that edge a bit by brushing it.

When the Quick Mask mode is on, tools like Blur simply blur the mask. They don't blur the image. Useful shortcuts here include the Left Bracket and Right Bracket keys to change the size of the brush, Right Bracket bigger, Left Bracket smaller. Shift+Right Bracket makes the brush have a harder edge, while Shift+Left Bracket feathers it out more. I tend to find that I'll do a soft feather, or I could click up here and manually dial in the Hardness settings that I need and adjust the size to taste.

Let's just continue to work through here at the image, and we're looking for the right tool to touch that up. Shift-clicking will draw straight strokes which can be useful, I need to pick up a little bit of the hat here and just paint in that area that was missing. Now up here, we have a bit of the tent pole that we don't want. So I'll press X to toggle my default colors of black and white. D will load them, and X will toggle them.

A simple mnemonic is Devil's Xylophone. And we can go in here and clean up our strokes. Now I don't want this tent, that's going to be a separate object, so I need to do a little bit more brushing here. And remember, you could toggle in between the two colors of black and white quite easily. There we go, and we're just touching that up. Let's pick up his chopped off arm there, drag on through, and this doesn't have to be perfect.

We still have the Refine Edge command, which we'll utilize in a second. I'll occasionally drag through with the Blur tool to soften up areas, particularly around heads and hair to create a more believable transition. And we're just cleaning that up. Now this is a relatively time-consuming process and probably the most time consuming part of prepping the files, but you really want to take the time here to get it right because this is what makes the effect believable, and a little bit of painting goes a long way.

Notice, by zooming in it becomes easier to make good judgment about what part of the pixels you're keeping and which you're discarding. Little bit of that ear and pick up the bit of the shoulder, and it looks like we've got it. I'll press Ctrl+Zero to zoom on out, and looking at the Quick Selection there I feel pretty confident that we've made a good edge.