Digital BW, The Print

> Thanks, Todd, for the concise yet complete explanation- it will help me even
> though I thought I knew how to do it!  I for one would like to hear more...
> 
> Bill Morse


Well, I hope I didn't make it sound like I had oodles more to offer, just
some tidbits and shortcuts.

First off, for painting on masks a pen and tablet are really nice. I use an
Intuos 6x8 size and it's great. I think the newest (which I don't have)
comes with a cordless mouse too. Either way with this thing plugged into USB
you can have your mouse plugged in and your pen at the same time and just
switch back and forth at will.

The pen allows you to either vary the brush size or brush opacity by the
pressure you apply. I use it to vary opacity, so I typically just keep Black
and White as my foreground/background colors and use pressure to vary the
paints opacity while I paint on the mask. Keep a hand on the key board by
the bracket keys to adjust the brush size.

Sometimes it's useful to see what your mask looks like overlaid over the
image. To do so, shift+option+click on the layer mask. Same keystroke turns
the overlay off. I find this overlay veiw really useful. To disable the
layer mask from the layer, shift click the mask. Ditto to reverse.

One great thing about masks are they are stored selections, so once you have
a mask and you want to reactivate it as a selection, just Command click the
mask. Say you want to do two separate treatments to the same area, make your
selection and your first adjustment layer. CMD+Click the layer later to
reactivate the selection and pull a new adjustment layer. The first one
might have been curves and the second Hue/Saturation.

Sometimes you isolate an area with a mask and want to do one treatment to
that area and another treatment to everything else, so you CMD+click the
mask to activate it as a selection and make your move, then CMD+Shift+I
inverts the selection so you can do your other move on everything else.
Sharpen one, blur the other?

As an aside, recently I was working an image that had really uneven
development in the sky, and it looked lousey. I tried isolating the sky and
doing a strong gaussian blur, but I didn't like that. Undo. Use the same
selection and create a Curves adj layer. I severely flattened the curve,
making the sky area really low contrast, and that looked much better than
the blur.

The other thing to keep in mind with masks is they are just grayscale
images, so anything PS can do to a grayscale image it can do on a mask.
Sometimes it's useful to do a levels move on our mask. For instance if you
used a brush that had too soft an edge, you can contract your levels end
points which will add contrast and tighten the edges of your mask. Sometimes
you worked with too hard a brush, so you can do a gaussian blur on your
mask. You can draw a selection on your mask and manipulate it separately
from the rest. Drawing gradients on masks can be really useful.

As Carolyn mentioned you can also change the entire adj layer's apply mode.
Things like overlay, and multiply can be useful. Sometimes just duping your
layer to double it's effect is useful.

Here's a way I sometimes make or at least start a mask, rather than painting
on it. Say you want to isolate the clouds in your BW landscape. Draw a rough
selection of the sky. Go to menu Select>Color Range. From the pull down menu
select highlights and okay it. This has just activated your clouds as a
selection. Create an adjustment layer while the selection is active and
badda bing, masked layer for your clouds.

Also, for complicated masks where you've already made some masks for the
image, you can combine parts of masks with each other through copy and
paste.

I think that's about all else I had. The thing to keep in mind is that masks
are grayscale images and you can to any treatment on them that PS allows to
a grayscale image, and that a mask is just a stored selection, so once you
have one it can be useful for many things, just CMD+click it to activate it.
The Option+Shift+click trick to view it in overlay mode is also really
useful.

Anyway, I think much of this is confusing to many, and is mostly esoterica.
Mostly what I do is what I described previously: draw a rough selection with
a well feathered lasso tool, pull a curve, then touch up the mask as needed.

Todd