Light Mask Photoshop Tutorial

[SolFire]

I thought I'd actually get around to adding a hint of content to my website, so I made a second rate photoshop tutorial.

Here is it for your viewing displeasure brought to you by the magic of copy and paste:
[from: http://www.solflare.com/?page=light-mask_tutorial/index ]
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This is rather basic, so many of you probably already know this. For those that dont, however, this is a rather handy trick.

This tutorial will show you how to remove a background based on lighting. This is in essence the same thing as Paint Shop Pro's Luminosity Mask (sp?).

There are several ways to remove a color in photoshop (blending modes, photoshop tools, filters, etc.), but I find this is the best for some types of images as it's very quick and easy and renders fairly good results.

First, we'll start with an image with a black background. Since I'm vain, I'll use part of my sig image as the subject:
<center></center>

Begin by copying the entire image to the clipboard. I do this by:


1) Pressing Ctrl+A for Select All
2) Pressing Ctrl+C for Copy


Next, press Q on your keyboard or press the QuickMask button as shown below:
<center></center>

Once in quick mask mode, press Ctrl+V to paste in the image you just copied.

Your image should now be highlited in red to indicate that the entire image is masked.
<center></center>

Exit QuickMask mode by pressing Q again or by clicking the button to the left of the QuickMask button.

Your image should now look like this:
<center></center>

This has selected the light areas of the image. Since we want to drop out the dark areas, you will need to invert the selection.

To invert the selection, either Right-Click and select Select Inverse or press Ctrl+Shift+I

Once you have inverted your selection, tap Delete to remove the selected area.
(Be sure that your image is not using indexed color and make sure that the layer you're on is not named "Background"!)

Your image should now look like this:
<center></center>

In order to bring out the image more, you may want to duplicate this layer a few times. This just makes it more opaque and easier to see.

After duplicating the layer a few times, it stands out more:
<center></center>

This method of dropping out the background is helpful because it keeps a fairly good level of transparency in most areas so you can "see through" parts of the image.


Hopefully, I havent insulted anyone by making this very basic. It's my first tutorial on this type of thing, so you'll have to bear with me.

[MathUser]

Here's a question, is this photoshop better than paintshop pro? I got their latest version but don'tuse it much cause it's too complicated.

[LiquidManZero]

That's interesting. I never knew about that.

[SolFire]

Photoshop is better than Paint Shop Pro, but the basic features are about the same.

Photoshop has a few more advanced things that you'll probably never have a use for. I think it may work better with histograms and channels and it has better masking, I believe.

I used PSP for quite a while and was quite happy with it, though. I made the logo on this forum in PSP7 a year or three ago - it worked just fine for that.

I use Photoshop at work because it lets you automate things and has a few features I use that are unique to it - but for most work (and at home), PSP is just as good.

[MathUser]

I'll have to download that photoshop I think. PSP confuses me, I can't even figure out how to draw or anything on the pictures. photoshop looks easier to use.

[LiquidManZero]

Photoshop is pretty easy to use, at least if you've read part of the manual. I remember trying to use paint shop pro awhile back, and couldn't figure out how to do much, even though I knew exactly how to do the same thing in both photoshop and gimp.