- 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
Five Really Helpful Things to Know Now About the Brush Masking Tool
After these two pages, we’re diving into an incredibly powerful masking tool, simply known as “the Brush” (formerly known as “the Adjustment Brush”). There are some things that if you learn them now, before you start working with the Brush, will make your brush life easier. So, let’s start with these:
#1: Changing the Size of the Brush
When you choose the Brush tool (K), in the Add New Mask panel, a panel of options appears (as seen here, at the bottom), where there’s a Size slider that you can drag to change the size of your brush. But, there’s a much faster and easier way to change its size: just the use the Bracket keys on your keyboard (they’re located to the right of the P key on a standard US keyboard). Pressing the Left Bracket key ([) makes your brush size smaller (as seen here, top left) and pressing the Right Bracket key (]) makes it larger (as seen here, top right).
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#2: There’s an Erase Brush, If You Mess Up or Paint “Outside the Lines”
If you’re painting over an area, it’s easy to paint somewhere you didn’t mean to (for example, while painting over the building here, on the top left, you can see red tint extending into the sky, where I accidentally painted outside the building). That’s when you reach for the Erase brush. You can click on the word “Erase” in the Brush section of the panel to switch to the Erase brush, but it’s much faster to press-and-hold the Option (PC: Alt) key to temporarily switch to it, and then paint where you messed up (as shown here, on the top right, where I’m painting over the spillover to erase it from my mask). Two notes: (1) You don’t have to leave the red-tinted overlay on to do this; it’s just much easier to see what you’re doing with it on. (2) You can choose the Erase brush’s settings by clicking on Erase, and then moving the sliders below.
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#3: You Have a Second Brush
You actually have two brushes to choose from: “A” (your regular brush) and “B,” an alternative brush you can switch to at any time, using the \ (backslash) key on your keyboard (or, of course, you can just click on “B” in the Brush section of the panel). What’s nice is you can choose your own settings for each brush. I usually give my “A” (regular) brush a soft edge, with a high Feather amount (as seen here, on the top), and my “B” brush a hard edge, by lowering the Feather amount to zero (as seen here, on the bottom). So, if I run into a situation where I’m painting along a wall, or another area where a soft edge looks weird, I can toggle over to my hard-edged “B” brush.
#4: Feather, Flow, and Density
There are three brush controls (besides Size) that are important: Feather is the softness of the edge of the brush (the higher the number, the softer and more blending the edge of the brush will be). The outer circle of your brush shows the Feather amount you have applied—the closer that outer circle is to the inner circle, the harder the brush edge. The Flow amount, if set below 100, lets the brush “build up” as you paint, kind of like spray paint or an airbrush. So, if you paint with the Flow set at 20, and then paint over it again and again, it gets darker and darker, and so on until it gets to 100% solid. You can limit how many times you can paint over an area (so it never gets to 100) by lowering the Density amount.
#5: There are Brush Presets
If you click on the word “Custom” to the right of Preset, at the top of the Brush adjustments panel, a pop-up menu of presets appears, and you can use any of these as a starting place for your edits. You can also create your own preset, if you wind up creating a look you like—just choose Save Current Settings as New Preset from the bottom of the menu.
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