Masking Techniques in Photoshop

Today i would like to share easy masking techniques in photoshop. In this tutorial you will learn about low cost masking service and how to mask out a horse using a solid fill. You will also edit the fill and use a linear gradient to achieve a faded effect. So, why not have a try...

1

Open any image you'd like to mask, or cut a portion out of it's background. You may use this image of a foal if you'd like. PC users right-click and choose Save Picture As.

2

We are going to cut the foal out of it's background. Select the Pen tool, in the Stroke panel change the fill to Black and the Stroke to Pencil and 1-Pixel soft. The reason you want black is because you are making a mask. Anything under the black will be visible. If you used white, anything below it would be invisible.Note, for Fireworks MX and MX 2004 reverse the colors. Anything under white will be visible and behind black will be invisible

3

Click points around the horse fairly close together as seen here. It's easier if you zoom in a bit. How carefully you mask an image depends on it's final destination. For demonstration purposes I'm not being extremely careful.

4

Using the Pen tool to mask rather than a selection gives you a lot of control. You can choose the Subselection tool (white arrow), click on a point and move it. You can also hold the Alt/Option key while you drag to change a point into a curve.

  

5

The image on the left shows the ear which needs a curve added. The Subselect tool is pointing at the point that will be selected. Press the Alt/Option key and drag out as seen in the right image. Notice how the curve better fits the ear shape. The image below shows the curve being added and moved inward.

6

Once your selection is made to your satisfaction, select the Paint Bucket Tool to fill with black. (In the Tools panel, the Colors area, select black for the fill color).

7

Take a look at the Layers panel, you'll see the bitmap image and a path.

8

To mask the image, select the path (it's probably already selected. You can tell as seen in the image above, the dark blue indicates it is selected). Shift+select the bitmap. You can either select the image directly or in the Layers panel. I find it easier to select from the Layers panel. You can see now that both the Path and Bitmap are dark blue.

9

Choose Modify|Mask|Group as Mask. As you can see here the entire background has dropped out and only the portion of the image under the black path is visible.

10

Ok, this mask was a solid black. But if you wanted an image to be partially transparent or fade out, the fill would be a linear gradient of black,white. You can make that change when you do the original fill or even after the fact like we will do now. Notice the Layers panel below. See how the image and the mask are grouped together? Click the pen icon to edit the mask.

11

To change this mask to one that fades, go to the Fill panel and choose Linear and the Black,white preset. The gradient handles will appear. If you don't see them, click the Pen icon to return them. Drag the square handle to over the back of the horse and the round handle as seen below. This will fade the legs out. For your work, move the black portion of the gradient so that the areas you want to be totally visibale show through and the white area to the parts you want totally invisiable. The shades of gray are varing degrees of transparency.

12

Let's see what happens to our horse. Choose Modify|Canvas Color|Custom and choose a colored background, I choose a green. Do you see a problem? Even though we changed the fill to a gradient, there is still an outline of the legs. This is because we originally make our path using a black stroke. It's easy enough to fix.

13

In the Stroke panel change the Stroke to None. As you can see in the image above there is a bit of white showing. Using the Subselection tool I moved a few of the points to fix it. As you can see, you can edit the mask even after it is grouped with the image.

Hope you can learn something new from this tutorial.

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Reference: joycejevans