- Five Handy Things to Know Right Up Front about Masking
- Editing Your Main Subject
- What to Do If It Doesn't Work Perfectly
- Getting Better Masking Results
- Better Looking Skies, Method 1: Select Sky
- Better Looking Skies, Method 2: Linear Gradient
- Better Looking Skies, Method 3: Masking Objects
- Better Looking Skies, Method 4: Preserving Your Clouds Using a Luminance Mask
- Five Really Helpful Things to Know Now About the Brush Masking Tool
- Painting with Light (Also Known as "Dodging and Burning")
- The Brush's Awesome Auto Mask Feature (How to Not Mask "Outside the Lines")
- Fixing the White Balance in Just One Part of Your Image
- Retouching Portraits
- Selecting People in Group Photos
- Editing Landscape Images
- Editing Your Background
- The Easy Way to Mask Anything (Not Just the Subject)
- Changing the Color of Something in Your Image (Point Color)
- Eight More Masking Things You'll Want to Know
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
Getting Better Masking Results
This technique uses an Intersect mask to clean up any spillover when your mask isn’t perfectly accurate (hey, it happens). For example, if you use Select Sky on a landscape and the edges around the trees aren’t quite right, that’s where this trick comes in. If you’re wondering what Intersect actually does, picture two large circles that overlap—Intersect masks the almond-shaped area where they cross. I don’t use Intersect all the time, but this is one case where it works like magic.
Step One:
Here’s our image of a statue of Louis XIV on horseback in front of the Louvre Museum in Paris, France. Click on the Masking icon (the circle with white dotted lines around it, in the toolbox just below the histogram) to open the Add New Mask panel with the masking tools, and then click on the Subject icon. You can see how that masked the statue here, but even zoomed out a bit, you can tell the mask isn’t very tight—especially around the horse where there’s some red spillover onto the sky where it rears up.
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Step Two:
I zoomed in here to 400%, and you can see around the horse’s mouth and below his chin that there’s quite a bit of spillover that appears in the red tint—it’s almost like the mask has a red glow to it. In cases like this, where we want a really tight mask, we can use this technique (well, the one you’re about to learn).
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Step Three:
In the Masks panel, click-and-hold on the three dots to the right of Subject 1 and from the pop-up menu, under Intersect Mask with, choose the exact same mask we applied initially (which, in this case, is Select Subject). That’s it. That’s the entire technique. Take a look at the Select Subject mask now—that got rid of nearly all the spillover red tint (there’s still a tiny bit, but not enough to matter), and we now have a much tighter and better mask .
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Step Four:
With the tighter mask, I can now lower the exposure, add some Clarity to make the statue a bit shinier (though that may be a tall order here), and take some highlights out of the base the statue is sitting upon. So, when you need a tighter, more accurate mask, this is your ticket.
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