(magical jingle)
Well hey everybody, I'm Nathaniel Dodson from tutvid.com
welcome right into this Photoshop tutorial where today
we're going to take a look at the Quick Masking Mode and just
useful and awesome it really can be. If you don't know about
Quick Masking, you really ought to know so check this quick
tutorial out. If you do enjoy the video make sure you subscribe
to my channel... or please, I should say PLEASE subscribe to my channel
because I'd really love to have you stick around and check
out more of the videos that we make here. Alright, without further ado
Let's jump into Photoshop and check this thing out!
Alright, here we are in Photoshop ready to check out the mighty little
Quick Mask Mode and all that it has to offer.
Quick Mask Mode: I think it's the perfect way to quickly-hence the name-create
selections or even modify existing selections that you're working on.
It's really an undervalued tool here in Photoshop.
The Quick Mask Mode button is this little icon here at the bottom of our toolbar
or you can quickly enter the Quick Mask Mode by hitting the letter "Q"
That's kind of my preferred way. Before we do that, though, let's double-click
on the Quick Mask icon and that's going to open the tool's options for us.
In this little dialog box that appears, I can choose what the color indicates,
(whatever that means) and I can also choose the color, well, follow me here.
I like to get away from the default "Masked Areas" selection that you probably
have and instead I like to choose the "Selected Areas" option.
You'll see exactly what this means in just a moment.
I also don't mind the standard red overlay color, but I might push mine up to 80%
opacity or so, just to make it a little bit more visible.
Now, we can go ahead and enter the Quick Mask Mode, quickly, by hitting
the letter "Q" on our keyboard. I'm going to grab my Brush tool and I'm
going to make sure that I'm using just a large, hard-edged brush to begin with
and I'll adjust the exact size of the brush tip by using the "[" & "]" keys
to make it either larger or smaller. Then I'm going to attempt to paint over
this little guy's trunks in an effort to copy them off of this layer
and pop them up onto a new layer. Once I've painted over the trunks entirely all
I have to do is hit the letter "Q" and it's going to convert my painting to a
selection. So it's sort of like a paint-on selection. Now, quick side note here:
This is why I chose the "Selected Areas choice in the Quick Mask options.
The default option will select everything in the document EXCEPT what you paint.
To me, that doesn't make a lot of sense. I find that it's far more intuitive, for me,
at least, (and useful) to know that whatever I paint over, that's what's going to be selected.
With this selection active, we can now use the hotkey Cmd/Ctrl + J to copy
his little swim trunks up onto a new layer. I'll drag the trunks out over the
water so we can see the edges of the selection. Look at this: because we used
a hard-edged brush, the selection isn't very natural or pretty to look at
it's very, sort of, hard-edged, right? It also may help in this case to open our
Quick Mask options and choose an overlay color OTHER than the default red
so I'm going to go with green here. Now, if we used a softer-edged brush here,
in fact, the softer the edge of the brush, the more "feathered" that edge of our
selection will be and zoom in a little bit more. I'll change the size of the
brush, take a little bit more time to paint around the edges of his trunks
and we'll get a much more natural-looking selection, something a lot nicer.
Also, if you paint over an area that you don't want selected, hit the letter "X" and
it'll swap your foreground and background color and it'll make your foreground color
white, and white will paint away selection. So, black paints selection on, white will
paint the selection away.
Now, we can hit the letter "Q" and it's going to load this new painting as a
selection and I'm going to add a Hue Saturation adjustment layer here
and I'm going to shift the color of his trunks to more of a blue hue,
maybe I'll desaturate them a little as well as well
and just try to, I don't know, match the rest of the image or something
just have a little bit of fun with it.
Now, one quick side-tip before I let you go: You can already have a selection
active and enter the Quick Mask Mode to further tweak and clean up that
selection. Let's say I've used the Quick Selection tool and selected this
little guy and his little inner tube I could hit the letter "Q" with that
selection active and enter the Quick Mask Mode. You can see how he's covered by the
green overlay already, but here I could grab my Brush tool and maybe paint
with like a huge, soft-edged brush and the foreground color is set to white
and use that to sort of fade the bottom of the selection so only the top half of this
boy in his floating tube got selected. Then I hit the letter "Q", load the
selection and it looks like a hard edge there, but it's got this massive fade
on it. Looks simple enough, but I'm going to add a Black & White
adjustment layer here and we're going to adjust this to make the top
half of him, we're going to convert it to black and white, including his tube.
In fact, I'm going to boost the levels of Red and Yellow and let's see if we can
make the red tube look almost look like a giant, floating piece of candy.
Pretty cool! And you can see with these couple, simple examples how powerful,
fast, and useful Quick Mask can be.
And that's going to pretty much be it folks!
If you think this tutorial has brought you some value, or you liked the video, maybe
learned a thing or two, consider supporting the channel by picking up a copy of my
Photoshop course, it's all about how to retouch images in Photoshop.
I think you'll really like it.
If you do pick up a copy, it helps support this channel, so for that I thank you so
very much. If not, make sure you at least subscribe to the channel because there
is a ton of free videos here on the channel that you can check out all about
photo retouching in Photoshop and all kinds of other stuff as well.
So guys, for Quick Masking, and brushing on selections, and just some of the little
nook & cranny features in Photoshop that I really think you should know and like
and enjoy: THAT'S IT! Get it? Got it? Good!
Nathaniel Dodson, tutvid.com,
I'll catch you in the next one!