Worth1000.com | Photoshop Contests | Are you Worthy™ | tutorial
I then use the Distort Transform (CTRL+T then right click - Distort) to adjust the frame to allow all the frog bits I want in and out of frame.
When I'm satisfied with the frame placement, then it's off to masking.
Page 4: Masking 1 There are numerous ways to make selections for masking, the pen tool (which would be a tutorial in itself) the lasso tool, quick masking. I'm going just select my layer mask on the original and paint with black all the areas that I don't want to show. I click on the white layer mask box in the Original layer. The small circle in box icon appears next to the layer picture and I know I'm painting ONLY in the mask. As you can see, as I paint with black, the image disappears (or is masked out). Painting with white reveals (or unmasks) the Original layer. I've turned off the Black and White layers (Layer 1 and Layer 2) for now, we'll use them when we closer to the edges of the frog.
I've completely masked out all parts of the background that would fall 'out of frame'. As you can see it's pretty rough at this point. Next well go in close and do some fine tuning on the mask.
Page 5: Masking 2 Now, let's zoom in on our frog's hindquarters and get some serious masking done. I'm using a soft 10pt brush with the air brush turned on to mask closer to the contours of the back and legs. Remember, if you mask over part of the frog, you can always select white as your paint color and reveal it again.
Now that I've fine tuned the mask closer to the frog, I turn on either the black (Layer 1) or white (Layer 2) background layers. This is nothing more than a way to help reveal areas that still need to be masked out, in this case the rust colored background shows up very well against the white, so I'll keep that one turned on.
Using a combination of smaller brushes, and the smudge tool on the layer mask (which will smudge the black painted areas into the white of the layer mask, giving a little more control over the detail work) I completely eliminate all notions of the background. Remember, working with layer masks is virtually foolproof. You can reveal what you mistakenly masked, or discard the entire mask and start again. After some tweaking and even finer tuning, I have this...
file:///C|/Worth1000/34.htm (2 van 4)13-6-2006 23:17:56