لطفا منتظر باشید ...
Color Plate 9-1. You can then edit the mask as desired and exit the quick mask mode to return to the standard selection outline. The quick mask mode is — as its name implies — expeditious and convenient, with none of the trappings or permanence of more conventional masks. It's kind of like a fast-food restaurant — you use it when you aren't overly concerned about quality and you want to get in and out in a hurry.
How the quick mask mode works
Typically, you'll at least want to rough out a selection with the standard selection tools before entering the quick mask mode. Then you can concentrate on refining and modifying your selection inside the quick mask, rather than having to create the selection from scratch. (Naturally, this is only a rule of thumb. I violate the rule several times throughout this chapter, but only because the quick mask mode and I are such tight friends.)To enter the quick mask mode, click the quick mask mode icon in the toolbox, as I've done in Figure 9-7. Or press Q. Starting with the same selection I used on the sculpted head in the previous steps section (I inversed the selection yet again so that the background was selected), I pressed Q and got the image shown in Figure 9-7. The head receives the mask because it is not selected. (In Figure 9-7, the mask appears as a light gray coating; on your color screen, the mask appears in red.) The area outside the head looks the same as it always did because it's selected and, therefore, not masked.
Figure 9-7: Click the quick mask mode icon to instruct Photoshop to express the selection temporarily as a grayscale image.
Notice that the selection outline disappears when you enter the quick mask mode. This happens because the outline temporarily ceases to exist. Any operations you apply affect the mask itself and leave the underlying image untouched. When you click the marching ants mode icon (to the left of the quick mask mode icon) or press Q, Photoshop converts the mask back to a selection outline and again enables you to edit the image.
| Note | If you click the quick mask mode icon and nothing changes on screen, your computer isn't broken; you simply didn't select anything before you entered the quick mask mode. When nothing is selected, Photoshop makes the entire image open for editing. In other words, everything's selected. (Only a smattering of commands under the Edit, Layer, and Select menus require something to be selected before they work.) If everything is selected, the mask is white; therefore, the quick mask overlay is transparent and you don't see any difference on screen. This is another reason why it's better to select something before you enter the quick mask mode — you get an immediate sense you're accomplishing something. |
Also, Photoshop enables you to specify whether you want the red mask coating to cover selected areas or deselected areas. For information on how to change this setting, see "Changing the red coating," which is the very next section.
In the quick mask mode, you can edit the mask in the following ways:
Subtracting from a selection: Paint with black to add red coating and, thus, deselect areas of the image. This means you can selectively protect portions of your image by merely painting over them.
Adding to a selection: Paint with white to remove red coating and, thus, add to the selection outline, as demonstrated in the left half of Figure 9-8. You can use the eraser tool to whittle away at the masked area (assuming the background color is set to white). Or you can swap the foreground and background colors so you can paint in white with one of the painting tools.
Figure 9-8: I painted in white with a soft-edged brush to enlarge the selected area (left). After switching out of the quick mask mode, I went a little crazy with the brush and smudge tools (right).
Adding feathered selections: If you paint with a shade of gray, you add feathered selections. You also can feather an outline by painting with black or white with a soft brush shape, as shown in the left image in Figure 9-8. Here, I'm painting in white with a soft-edged brush, adding a nice feathered edge to the top of the selection. Then after re-entering the world of the marching ants, a little more painting and smudging creates the image on the right in Figure 9-8.
Cloning selection outlines: If you have a selection outline that you want to repeat in several locations throughout the image, the quick mask is your friend. Select the transparent area with one of the standard selection tools, press and hold Ctrl+Alt (z -Option on the Mac), and drag the selection to a new location in the image, as shown in Figure 9-9. Although I use the rectangular marquee tool in the figure, the magic wand tool also works well for this purpose. To select an antialiased selection outline with the wand tool, set the Tolerance value to about 10 and be sure the Anti-aliased check box is active. Then click inside the selection. It's that easy.
Figure 9-9: To clone the eye sockets selection, I marquee- dragged around it. Then I pressed Ctrl+Alt (z -Option on the Mac) and dragged it first to the top, and then to the bottom (left). This enabled me to switch out of the quick mask mode and paint details into the new eye sockets (right).
Transforming selection outlines: You can scale or rotate a selection independently of the image, just as you can with the Transform Selection command (covered in Chapter 8). Enter the quick mask mode, select the mask using one of the standard selection tools, and choose Edit Free Transform or press Ctrl+T (z -T on the Mac). (See Chapter 12 for more information on Free Transform and related commands.)
These are only a few of the unique effects you can achieve by editing a selection in the quick mask mode. Others involve tools and capabilities I haven't yet discussed, such as filters and color corrections.
When you finish editing your selection outlines, click the marching ants mode icon (to the left of the quick mask mode icon) or press Q again to return to the marching ants mode. Your selection outlines again appear flanked by marching ants, and all tools and commands return to their normal image-editing functions. Figure 9-10 shows the results of switching to the marching ants mode and pressing Ctrl+J (z -J on the Mac) to float the selection to a new layer. I then filled the background layer with white and threw in a drop shadow for good measure.
Figure 9-10: The results of creating new layers from the selected areas in the right examples of Figures 9-8 (left) and 9-9 (right).
| Tip | As demonstrated in the left example of Figure 9-10, the quick mask mode offers a splendid environment for feathering one selection outline while leaving another hard-edged or antialiased. Granted, because most selection tools offer built-in feathering options, you can accomplish this task without resorting to the quick mask mode. But the quick mask mode enables you to change feathering selectively after drawing selection outlines, something you can't accomplish with Select Feather. The quick mask mode also enables you to see exactly what you're doing. Kind of makes those marching ants look piddly and insignificant, huh? |
Changing the red coating
By default, the protected region of an image appears in translucent red in the quick mask mode, but if your image contains a lot of red, the mask can be difficult to see. Luckily, you can change it to any color and any degree of opacity that you like. To do so, double-click the quick mask icon in the toolbox (or double-click the Quick Mask item in the Channels palette) to display the dialog box shown in Figure 9-11.
Figure 9-11: Double-click the quick mask mode icon to access the Quick Mask Options dialog box. You then can change the color and opacity of the protected or selected areas when viewed in the quick mask mode.
Color Indicates: Choose Selected Areas to reverse the color coating so that the translucent red coating covers selected areas and deselected areas appear normally. Choose Masked Areas (the default setting) to cover deselected areas in color.
| Tip | You can reverse the color coating without ever entering the Quick Mask Options dialog box. Simply Alt-click (Win) or Option-click (Mac) the quick mask icon in the toolbox to toggle between coating the masked or selected portions of the image. The icon itself changes to reflect your choice. |
Color: Click the Color icon to display the Color Picker dialog box and select a different color coating. (If you don't know how to use this dialog box, see the "Using the Color Picker" section in Chapter 4.) You can lift a color with the eyedropper after the Color Picker dialog box appears; just keep in mind that you probably want to use a color that isn't in the image so that you can see the mask better.
Opacity: Enter a value to change the opacity of the translucent color that coats the image. A value of 100 percent makes the coating absolutely opaque.
Change the color coating to achieve the most acceptable balance between being able to view and edit your selection and being able to view your image. For example, the default red coating shows up poorly on my grayscale screen shots, so I changed the color of the coating to light blue and the Opacity value to 65 percent before shooting the screens featured in Figures 9-7 through 9-9.
Gradations as masks
If you think that the Feather command is a hot tool for creating softened selection outlines, wait until you get a load of gradations in the quick mask mode. There's no better way to create fading effects than selecting an image with the gradient tool.
Fading an image
Just to make this explanation more difficult, I'm going to show you how to create a gradient mask by using an image of an actual mask, shown in Figure 9-12. This is no doubt some primitive sacred relic from a bygone civilization, but that won't stop me from turning it into a towering monolith like you might find on Easter Island.
Figure 9-12: You can create a linear gradient in the quick mask mode to make the mask (left) rise from the middle of the field (right).
Here we go: Switch to the quick mask mode by pressing Q. Then use the gradient tool to draw a linear gradation from black to white. (Chapter 6 explains exactly how to do so.) The white portion of the gradation represents the area you want to select. I wanted to select the top portion of the mask, so I drew the gradation from just below the lower lip to the bottom of the nose, as shown in the first example of Color Plate 9-2.)
Figure 9-13: After drawing a linear gradation in the quick mask mode over the bottom of the image (left), I hid the image and applied the Add Noise filter with an Amount of 10 (right).
Banding can be a problem when you use a gradation as a mask. To eliminate the banding effect, apply the Add Noise filter at a low setting several times. To create the right example in Figure 9-13, I applied Add Noise using an Amount value of 10 and the Uniform distribution option.
| Tip | In the right example of Figure 9-13, I hid the image so that only the gradient mask is visible. As the figure shows, the Channels palette lists the Quick Mask item in italics. This is because Photoshop regards the quick mask as a temporary channel. You can hide the image and view the gradient mask in black and white by clicking the eyeball in front of the color composite view, in this case RGB. Or just press the tilde key (~) to hide the image. Press tilde again to view the gradient mask and image together. |
To apply the gradation as a selection, I returned to the marching ants mode by again pressing Q. I then Ctrl-dragged (z -dragged on the Mac) the selected portion of the mask and dropped it into the open field, as seen in the left half of Chapter 12), scorched the mask with the burn tool (see Chapter 5), and added dramatic lighting effects. The result is shown on the right in Color Plate 9-2.
Figure 9-14: The result of selecting the top portion of the mask using a gradient mask and then Ctrl-dragging (z -dragging on the Mac) and dropping the selection into the field (left). Throw in a little more tweaking, and you have your own personal Easter Island (right) — minus the bunnies, of course.
Applying special effects gradually
You also can use gradations in the quick mask mode to fade the outcomes of filters and other automated special effects. For example, I wanted to apply a filter around the edges of the image that appears in Figure 9-15. I began by deselecting everything in the image by pressing Ctrl+D (z -D on the Mac) and switching to the quick mask mode. Then I selected the gradient tool, selected the linear gradient style icon in the Options bar, and selected the Foreground to Transparent gradient from the Gradient drop-down palette. I also selected the Transparency check box in the Options bar.
Figure 9-15: This time around, my intention is to surround the foreground image with a gradual filtering effect.
I pressed D to make the foreground color black. Then I dragged with the gradient tool from each of the four corners of the image inward to create a series of short gradations that trace around the focal point of the image, as shown in Figure 9-16. (As you can see, I've hidden the image so that you see the mask in black and white.) Because I've selected the Foreground to Transparent option, Photoshop adds each gradation to the previous gradation.
Figure 9-16: Inside the quick mask mode, I dragged from each of the four corners with the gradient tool (as indicated by the arrows).
To jumble the pixels in the mask, I applied Filter Noise Add Noise with an Amount value of 24. You see the effect in Figure 9-16.
| Tip | The only problem is that I want to select the outside of the image, not the inside. So I need the edges to appear white and the inside to appear black, the opposite of what you see in Figure 9-16. No problem. All I do is press Ctrl+I (z -I on the Mac) to invert the image. Inverting inside the quick mask mode produces the same effect as applying Select Inverse to a selection. |
Finally, I switched back to the marching ants mode by again pressing Q. Then I applied Filter Render Clouds to get the atmospheric effect you see in Figure 9-17.
Figure 9-17: After switching back to the marching ants mode, I chose Filter Render Clouds to create the foggy effect shown here.
| Tip | Notice the corners in the mask in Figure 9-16? These corners are soft and rounded, but you can achieve all kinds of corner effects with the gradient tool. For harsher corners, select the Foreground to Background gradient and select Lighten from the Mode pop-up menu in the Options bar. For some really unusual corner treatments, try out the Difference and Exclusion brush modes. Wild stuff. |
Creating gradient arrows
The following steps explain how to add cool fading arrows to any image, similar to the one shown back in Figure 9-13. Photoshop not only makes it easy to use gradients for fading effects, but also makes it a breeze to create dramatic drop shadows for image elements, as demonstrated in Figures 9-18 and 9-19. The steps involve a gradient layer mask, the Free Transform command, the line tool, and a little old-fashioned layer opacity.
STEPS: Creating Fading Arrows with Drop Shadows
Draw an arrow with the line tool, creating a shape layer. First, select the line tool and make sure the Shape Layers button is selected in the Options bar. Click the Geometry Options and give your line an arrowhead at the end. No doubt a bit of trial-and-error will be necessary to get the right settings. (To create the arrow in the top example of Figure 9-18, I used a Weight of 25, both a Width and a Length of 400 percent, and a Concavity setting of 25 percent.) Set the foreground color to white and then drag to draw your arrow in the desired direction.
Figure 9-18: Use the line tool with appropriate arrowhead settings to draw an arrow (top). To create the perspective distortion effect, select the points on the top-left side of the arrow and rotate them using Free Transform. Add a drop shadow layer style for extra dimension (bottom).
| Cross-Reference | For the straight dope on using the shape tools, check out Chapter 14. |
Use rotation to create a perspective effect for the arrow. I switched to the direct selection tool and selected the points on the top-left side of the arrow. Next I chose Edit Free Transform Points, moved the rotation point from the center to the upper-right corner by adjusting the reference point location control in the Options bar, and rotated the selected points.
Apply a drop shadow. I clicked the layer style icon at the bottom of the Layers palette and selected Drop Shadow. I accepted the default settings, but you can tweak as you wish. The bottom image in Figure 9-18 shows the result.
Create a layer mask. Choose Layer Add Layer Mask Reveal All.
Draw a gradient mask. Select the gradient tool and make sure the Black to White gradient is selected in the Options bar. Then draw a gradient on the arrow, starting at the end of the arrow and extending to around the middle, as shown in the top example of Figure 9-19.
Figure 9-19: Drag from the end of the arrow upward to create a gradient layer mask that makes the arrow seem to fade into view (top). Lower the layer's Opacity value, and the result makes it much easier to keep your eye on the ball (bottom).
Lower the overall opacity of the arrow. Now I have a nice fade to transparency within the arrow, but it seems that the top of the arrow is obscuring too much of the image. No problem; I just reduce the Opacity of the arrow layer in the Layers palette to 70 percent. The bottom image in Figure 9-19 shows the result. Isn't it neat how you can combine the sharp edges of the vector shape tools with the soft edges of the layer mask?
