Professional Masking | How to use Quickmask
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Running Time: 8 minutes
For Advanced Photoshop Magazine #130, I was asked to show how I create my selections. In this extended video, I’m going to show you the ins and outs of Professional Masking.
Properly masking an image with Adobe Photoshop is often done using one of the simple selection tools like Magic Wand or Lasso. This is simply the wrong approach. You should actually be using Color Range and QuickMask. If you’re itching to know how I work around these tools, you’ve come to the right place. I’m going to let you in on the tips and tricks that I use behind the scenes in order to come up with a clean and accurate final image. Lets get started.
Overall Photoshop Workflow and Selections
During college I enjoyed traditional airbrushing. The use of frisket masking was frequent and became second nature. My first job, and many after, was in Prepress working with film. Early on, I was being shown how to paint with a brush on the film to stop the light, and scratching it away to let the light through. The basic principle in both situations was the same.
When it came to Photoshop, the defaults tried to mimic what was happening in the darkroom, but this always led to confusion in the digital medium. Somewhere between the darkroom and the computer screen it stopped working as well as it once did. This just took me back to simple tools like Magic Wand and Lasso until I figured out the missing elements. This is where Quickmask and Color Range come in.
Which Tools For Which Purpose?
As much of the color or tonal changes I make are subtle, loose masks are fine using Quickmask and a soft brush. Photoshop can be very forgiving.
For studio portraits shot against white or grey, I can easily replace the background with whatever I want. With Color Range and Quickmask, I can make fast but accurate silhouettes around the subject. Sometimes I will replace with solid white, other times it could be a standard backdrop across a group of images.
I’ve seen many tutorials that show how to use Green Screen for the backdrop. One tutorial comes to mind that was complete and very thought out. Then the very first time I tried his technique, it wouldn’t work because of the poor photography.I just couldn’t help but think how the whole topic could have been avoided if a simple White Sheet was used instead.
When we remove the creative elements, using Photoshop is acutally about repetition. I will use Curves and Selective Color over and over again. The difference in using each tool is being able to target specific elements by using selections. This makes the results of the same repeating Adjustment Layers quite different each time they are applied.
A Predictable Workflow Will Increase Productivity, Speed, and Efficiency.
Nearly every image that crosses my desk uses Select > Color Range for general selecting, and Select > Edit in QuickMask for refinement. I have two basic ways to make any of my selections. When I have larger areas of common color, I will use Color Range to make selections easy, although not perfect. I can then go into Quickmask to fine tune the areas I want include or exclude.
The other way I create manual selections is to go right into Quickmask. By using a small paint brush, I will trace along the perimeter of the areas that I want. I can then fill in the interior with the Paint Bucket, Magic Wand and Edit > Fill, or just paint with the brush. When I exit Quickmask, I have a manually created selection that I can apply to my Adjustment Layers as a Layer Mask.
Extracting Backgrounds Can Be Easy or Hard.
For skin and clothing, a tight mask using a small brush with Quickmask is the most accurate way. When it comes to natural selection of the hair, nothing is easy. I will do as much as I can with Quickmask, but will often use Refine Mask to try and ease the transitions.
My biggest troubles usually happen when the client may decide to extract the background completely, and replace the entire back with white. They may be going for a clean look, but fighting with hair can become a real issue if the original had a busy background.
Sometimes, there is a color in multiple areas at the same time, like green trees and grass. If I only want one of them, I will use the Lasso Tool to make a very loose selection first around the area I want to keep. Then, I can use Color Range to refine the target selection. Basically, the Lasso limits the Color Range’s selectable areas.
Getting Setup
By default, Photoshop tries to match how things were done in the darkroom. However, this often leads to confusion. By using this updated workflow, you may find that your masks and selections greatly increase in their simplicity and accuracy.
Double-Click on the Quickmask icon below the colors in the Tool Palette. This will open up the Quickmask Preferences. Change Color Indicates to be Selected Areas, and the Opacity to 100%. When you click OK, you will be brought into the Quickmask Mode. Push the Quickmask icon one more time to return to normal Photoshop.
Use Color Range For Fast Selections
Let’s say you want to grab a group of colors across the entire image very quickly. Color Range tool is a crucial aspect of Photoshop Masking that many people have difficulties using. The tool plays a significant role in selecting groups of colored areas that need to be adjusted separately in a particular image. Color Range has the quickest and simplest options available for selecting complex patterns as well. In addition, you are able to preview your selection and fine tune the best results, before committing to the task.
Color Range is all about the Color and the Fuzziness.
It is important to keep in mind two parameters: color, where one can select multiple colors to use, and fuzziness. Fuzziness aspect makes a selection of all the colors close to the one you have provided by a fuzz value. You can adjust the fuzziness value to a number that you most prefer to fine tune your eyedropper selection. The maximum fuzziness value is 200, but that usually grabs way too much.
Set the Fuzziness to about 40. This determines how much Photoshop selects in a color. For example, when we click over to a yellow area, Photoshop will select more yellow when the fuzziness is higher, and less yellow when the fuzziness is lower.
Color Range gives you a chance to preview the selection before finalizing it.
The quickest way to select an area is to go to Select – Color Range. Note though that you can’t use Color Range while in QuickMask mode, so make sure that you turn off the QuickMask mode or else the color Range option will be grayed out. In the Color Range dialog box, choose “QuickMask” in your Selection Preview so that you can see what is actually being selected. Other options include:
- No preview in the image window for none to preview
- Grayscale would do so as to feature it in the grayscale channel
- Black matte for the selection of display in the black matte back ground
- White matte for the selection of display in the white matte white back ground
Color Range provides you with numerous options for color based tasks.
On the image or preview area, place the pointer and click to bring a range of colors you want included. The preview selection will visually adjust itself, as you build upon it in the next steps. Then, adjust the selection of color ranges. You can click on your colors and add to your selection by holding down the Shift key, or simply click on the button on the dialog box that says “Add to Selection”. Repeat this step a couple of times so as to get a sharp and clearly outlined selection.
- For color addition (Shift key), select the "eyedropper plus" and click the preview area of the color you want added.
- For color reduction (Option key), click the preview image by selecting the minus eyedropper.
Refine Your Selected Edge with Expand and Feather.
When you’re satisfied with your Color Range selection, click OK. You can then refine your selection even more by using Select – Modify – Expand, or Contract. Expand adds pixels to your selection, while Contract removes them. Depending on what you’re doing, you can adjust these to about 2 or 4 pixels. Remember that it’s sometimes better to go and overlap 1 or 2 pixels onto the next color when making a selection.
To soften your edges, you can go to Select – Modify – Feather. And if you want to make an inverted selection, you can go to Select – Inverse.
Use QuickMask For Accurate Selections
While the Magic Wand and the Lasso tools could work, they’re not very accurate and frankly, they don’t really do a good job with selecting colors. It may work with random parts of an image, but both Quickmask and Color Range will leave you in full control of which areas you want selected.
Quickmask is the professional way to go.
The purpose of the Quickmask tool is to create frisket masking which will allow you to manually select individual areas of colors or shapes. Visually, it creates a colored overlay that will go on top of the image that will later be selected for editing. It can be useful for getting any background isolated or to allow individual items in a picture to be highlighted so they can be edited. Once created, you can then use any other tools in Photoshop exclusively on the area that you masked out.
Quickmask is Easy with Altered Preferences.
I strongly recommend changing the default settings. Double-click on the Quickmask button under the colors at the bottom of the Tool Palette, and a dialog box will open. Use “Selected Areas” and 100% opacity. Click OK. What happens now is that using the paint brush tool, you can create a color overlay that will keep the items outside of the selected area from being edited. This overlay will be red by default, and will be opaque. Click on the QuickMask button again, and you will go back into the regular editing mode, but this time, you will have a selection, based on the areas that you painted while in QuickMask.
Masking Will Make or Break Your Selections.
If you can’t cut a mask’s hard and soft edges where they need to be to blend into the background, then your retouching becomes very obvious and unsuccessful. You can adjust your brush size and the softness of the edges of your brush depending on what you are selecting.
While creating masks in Photoshop can be a tedious task, there are several ways of cutting corners, allowing you to use the QuickMask to achieve your goals faster than before. In addition to using brushes, you can also use the magic wand, gradients and the paint bucket tools to quickly fill large areas.
Usually though, I simply use a Black Brush with 80% Hardness to trace the contours of the desired area by hand. It’s fairly easy to do if you use the Shift-Click method. With a brush selected, click once, hold down the Shift key, and then click again to create a straight line. As the brush goes from point to point, you can trace edges with short straight lines more efficiently. With some practice, you will never notice you actually used straight edges.
Remember that whenever you make a mistake, you can always swap your brush to White so that you can remove wrong selections from your mask.
In Summary
By default, Photoshop tries to match how things were done in the darkroom. However, this often leads to confusion. By using this updated workflow, you may find that your masks and selections greatly increase in their simplicity and accuracy.
Start by changing some basic settings.
Double-Click on the Quickmask icon below the colors in the Tool Palette. This will open up the Quickmask Preferences. Change Color Indicates to be Selected Areas, and the Opacity to 100%. When you click OK, you will be brought into the Quickmask Mode. Push the Quickmask icon one more time to return to normal Photoshop.
Begin to work with Color Range.
From the top menu, select Edit > Color Range and change the settings to be Sampled Colors, Fuzziness to 40, and Preview of Quickmask. With the preference changes of Quickmask and Color Range, you can now easily see your selection. The areas you want selected will display bright red. When you push OK, you will have your mask turned into a selection. To further target a specific area, start by using the Lasso to make a loose selection, and then Color Range to create the mask. By using this method, it will limit the selectable area, allowing for more targeted final selections.
Make your final touches.
After using Color Range, the edges can be a bit jagged, or not reach the edges completely, or it may even leave little pinholes. To get around these problems, you can create a simple Action. Using Edit > Expand 4 and then Edit > Feather 4 will fill in smaller pinholes, and soften the hard edges. Basically, this will make the selection a little bigger, and a little softer. It’s not usually noticeable, but it corrects minor imperfections that Color Range often leaves behind.
You can now push the Quickmask icon, and manually edit the mask using the Paint Brush Tool. Black will add to the mask, and White will remove from it. By changing your Brush Size and Hardness, you will be able to further clean up the details. Finish by pushing the Quickmask icon once again, and now you can apply your mask to the Adjustment Layer of choice.
There you have it.
Thank you for taking the time to join me in this in-depth look at how I work with making selections professionally. I’ll be more than happy to share comprehensive, easy-to-follow, and bite-sized tutorials with you at The Art of Retouching Studio. Simply click on the link to get access to a vast collection of lessons on Photoshop basics, advanced techniques, and insider tips and tricks to help you become a master photo retoucher.
