Photoshop Masking Tools for Easy Cut Outs
Hey Cafe Crew, it's Colin Smith here from Photoshop Cafe and today I've got a fun tutorial.
We're going to do a little bit of compositing and masking, but I'm going to show you a feature
inside Masking that a lot of people are not aware of.
So why don't we start by just bringing in the Leaning Tower of Pisa here.
And yes, we're just going to have a little bit of fun with this.
This is a fun tutorial and I'm just going to hit the "5" key and that will set it to
about 50% opacity, and then we can just kind of move things into position so we can sort
of see where we're going.
And, yes, this is why the tower is leaning because this Dalmatian decided to knock it
over--not really.
Okay, here's one of the things that happens.
A lot of the time, people will be masking.
We've created a mask right there and we're going to grab a black brush.
Don't worry, this is not the tip yet, but I'm just going to show you, you know, sometimes
we'll start here and we'll kind of, you know, be cleaning things up a little bit.
And at some point, you might want to use some of the masking tools to help you so you don't
have to leave the mask.
All you need to do is double-click the mask here to open the Properties and if you don't
get that, you can get the Select a Mask and then just go under the Window and choose Properties.
And there's a couple of ways we can do this.
I'm actually going to use both tools just to show you how they work together.
So, we're going to start with Color Range and I'm just going to grab the little "+"
(plus) there and make sure we grab the areas in here that we want.
This is not going to get perfect, but it's going to be a good start.
Now we can play around with the fuzziness a little bit.
Okay, it's not bad.
Now, we click OK.
Notice it's not perfect.
Now, of course, we can get in here with our brush, you know, our black brush here and
just make sure that the Hardness is all the way up, you know, and we could go in here
and we could clean all this stuff up, right?
We can just get rid of all these around the edges that we don't need because that's how
the masking works, but let's use some of the other tools to help us a little bit more.
So what we're going to do now is we're going to use "Select a Mask" and yes, you can use
Select a Mask and Color Range together, why not?
Okay, so what we want to do, though, is first of all, I'm going to grab this tool here,
the third one down, which is the Brush Tool.
And what we want to do is we actually just want to brush back in those areas.
So, if you hit the bracket keys or right-click there.
We can bring that up or we can use the left and right bracket keys to kind of make this
brush bigger.
So I'm just going to go here and I'm going to go all the way around.
So, I'm not really worried about trying to keep this mask perfect right now.
We'll go all the way to the edges.
We're allowed to mess this stuff up.
And I'm going to make a smaller brush here and we're going to go down here and paint
in the flag.
All right, awesome.
Now, we're going to change over to this Refine Tool.
And now with the Refine Tool, we can just paint over there and maybe make it a little
bit smaller, and we can just go around these edges.
And one of the cool things you'll find about this algorithm as you're working, it actually
starts to enhance the other areas as well, so it becomes more intelligent the more information
you give it.
All right, so we're most of the way there and at this point here, we can just click
OK.
But, before you do, make sure you choose Layer Mask, so we'll keep it all in the same layer
and we click OK.
So here we are right now, we're still working with the same layer mask.
So the cool thing about working in this mask is if I hit the Shift key and select it, you
notice everything is still there, so we can just keep working in this mask.
So, I'm going to grab the Brush Tool again.
With a soft-edged brush, I'm going to just bring that hardness all the way down and drop
the size, and then we can just kind of blend these people and see that at the bottom there?
So you can still always use the mask the same way you always have because we're still working
in a mask.
All right, I know a lot of people love to do the manual masking but it's awesome that
you can also use these tools to help you without ever leaving your layer mask.
All right, so we're just having a little bit of fun here.
I hope you enjoyed this.
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