Thursday & Friday, Dec. 13 – 14, 2008

Secrets of the Mask: Selections & Masking in Adobe Photoshop CS3

Instructor: Sean Duggan

The ability to make accurate selections and masks is one of the keys to doing good work in Photoshop. This 2-day hands-on workshop will concentrate on core Photoshop concepts that relate to selections, channels and layer masks. Masks can be used in a variety of situations for many different types of image-editing, including contrast and color correction masks for photographic images and intricate masks for compositing multiple images together. In any case, there is a mask, or the beginnings of one, already present in your photograph. You just need to know where to look for it and how to modify it to suit your purposes.

Workshop topics will include:

• How to “read” a color channel
• Differences between color channels and alpha channels
• Why selections, alpha channels and masks are the same thing
• Selection Tools and Skills: Beyond the Basics
• Gray Matters: Understanding how grayscale tonality relates to selections and transparency
• How to create and edit a Gradient Mask
• Using existing channel information to “jump start” a mask
• Creating a mask that has both hard and soft edges
• How to create precise layer masks for localized tonal adjustments; techniques for mask editing, adjustments and combining masks
• Using color Range, the Extract command, and the Background
• Eraser for isolating difficult objects
• The Pen tool for precision masking: Why it’s worth all the effort
• Layer Clipping Groups: Masking without a mask