Project 3 — Becca.

I have revised my opinion of masks since learning to use them properly. While they're not always reliable, I find them much more intuitive than the marquee selection tools.

I started with an experiment in contrast. Both of the first images were shot in fairly consistent light environments. The first one I chose was a photo of a pair of black cats.


This strongly shadowed duo was very easy to isolate with Color Range. I barely even had to fix any holes in the mask. (As you can see, the furry edges are not perfect, but it would be fairly simple, if time-consuming, to go in and tinker with a pixel-sized brush around their tails and ears to get stray hairs into the selection.)


For more of a challenge, I chose an image containing a white kitten for the second attempt.


The white kitten's silvery fur made it very hard to select. Even with the Localized Color Clusters option turned on, Color Range was not able to separate the kitten from the white floor in the background effectively. I had to do a lot of hand painting in Quick Mask mode to get even a halfway passable result. I'm not too proud of how it turned out, but it did demonstrate that masking is probably not the best tool for the job — however, because of the blown highlights in the image, Refine Edge did not make the selection any better.


(On the SWS server, both of these images should be uploaded as PSD files so that the selection is visible: I moved each selection to its own new layer to make it easier to compare against the background.)

The clipping mask was easy. I found a beautiful image of colorful fireworks to be clipped in.


To make the title, I just used the same technique we went over in class to get this festive result. (I know it's not appropriate to the current season, but I quailed at the idea of attempting to insert turkeys into my art.)


Finally, I wanted to use a steampunk motif for my composition. An artist whose work I follow on DeviantART loves to make stock photographs with elaborate steampunk costumes: the one I used is from my favorite series.


I also found a fantastic picture of a stone doorway and a wooden hall to use as the background.

The background needed color correction to blend in better with the girl's waiflike pale skin and red hair, and I also lowered the saturation value to make it look more like a faded photograph. The shadows I drew by hand with the Burn tool, and the faint scrollwork at the top was done with a stamp brush, to give the composition a fairy-tale feel. I added in the pair of black cats from the previous exercise, erasing part of the image so that it looked like they were peeking out from around the doorway.


The most time-consuming part of this process was editing the mask I used to capture the girl. Color Range did an inefficient job of separating her from the background, so I had to delineate the edges by hand with the pen tool. The shorcut key — X to switch from white to black — made this a lot easier.

Overall, I would say that I need much more practice with masking, and also with techniques for blending different layers of a composition together and making them look realistic, but I think this has been the most useful, if difficult, project we've done so far.