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Lesson Info
Quick Masks Mode
Quick mask mode. I think this is something that a lot of people use and quick mask mode allows you to essentially use a mask when you're creating a selection. And I'll show you what I mean by that. If I wanted to select that car, I can click on the quick selection tool, click and drag, and it has a lot of detail and I'm not gonna get all the detail in the first pass and that's okay. Now, in some areas, it may be difficult to see what you're selecting, like this area here, that area there. So, you can simply press Q on the keyboard, Q, the letter Q for quick, and that gives us access so the quick selection tool, to the quick selection mode. So anything that's in red is not selected. So notice how we didn't select that area up here, we didn't select this area here, well we can simply paint that selection in. We're not in a mask right now, we're still using a selection. So, I can zoom in and just like a mask, in quick mask mode, I can paint with black to hide or white to reveal. Currently...
, my foreground color is black. If I want my foreground color to be white, so that I can paint with white and reveal these areas, I can press the X key on the keyboard. Notice that when I press X, the colors swap, foreground and background, see how they're swapping? So X swaps foreground from background. And then I can paint with white and it won't be that obvious until I'm done with the selection. I'm gonna go fairly quickly here it's not important to get an accurate selection just so you can see how the technique works. So, I've added those pixels to the selection. If I press the Q key once again, notice now that the selection matches the area that I painted on. I'm gonna press the Q key once again and I'm gonna zoom in to a different area. I pressed the Z key on the keyboard to select the zoom tool and if I wanted to select these tires I could also select the electo marque tool and just make a selection. Notice that when I'm making a selection it's not really in the spot that I want it in so I can hold the space bar and move it as I'm creating that selection. So now I can move that, try to match that tire as best as I can. And I can actually fill with white to make those tires come out. So I can press control backspace--oops I'm sorry about that it's alt backspace option delete on the mac to fill with the foreground color which is white. When I filled with the foreground color, notice now that I have a much better selection around that tire so that's one good way of working with selections. You create your initial selection with the quick selection tool, you go into quick mask mode, and then you can use the other selection tools and use them accordingly to fill with black or white depending on what you're trying to do. I could also select the polygonal lasso tool and just follow the contours of the car. And again I'm going fairly quickly here I'm not being that accurate but I think you get the idea. Once I make that selection I can once again fill with white alt backspace option delete on the mac and it fills with white and it reveals those pixels. When I'm done I can simply press the Q key once again and now I have a much better selection. Obviously if I were working, if this were a real project I would wanna use the layer mask rather than a selection so I always start with selections and then move on to layer masks. So, we'll pretend that this is an awesome selection and if I'm done, I can just click on that icon to create that layer mask which is the same thing. This layer mask is exactly the same as the selection that we had there. Also just for your reference you can actually save selections. So maybe I don't want a layer mask but I do want to save that selection for something else. I can go into select, save selection, I can give it a name, I'll just call it selection or I'll call it car selection to be more accurate. Car selection and press okay. Now I have a saved selection, but where did it go? Selections are simply channels. So if I go into the channels panel, you can see my car selection right there. There it is. See? Notice how the marching ants match that channel exactly. So when you save a selection it becomes a channel and you can always access that selection by holding control or command, clicking on that channel, or, by pressing, going back into the layers panel and going into select, load selection, and selecting it from the drop down here where it says channel see there it is car selection. Car selection, press okay, and it loads that selection once again. So you can save selections, but in reality they become channels. So you can save your selections if you need to.
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Ratings and Reviews
Gary Price
Probably mistitled as "for beginners" Moves very quickly, sometimes without clearly describing actions taken. This is fast paced and often assumes that the listener is very familiar with photoshop. Good tips if you are already familiar...