Project 3: Karel Rasovsky

Color Range vs. Mask Palette

Both – the Color Range and Mask Palette tools – stand on their own merit. I usually used both in the process of isolating objects and compiling a new multi-layer composition. Starting with a flat image, Color Range was a good enough first tool to sketch out a rough selection of an object from the image, without the complexity of building a layer. The colors to be selected can be adjusted and the results can be viewed dynamically, saving valuable time. Inevitably, I would always find myself reverting to the quick mask mode for finer editing work on the mask. Having access to all the familiar selection tools (e.g. magnetic lasso) offers flexibility when refining the mask. Saving the selection outline in the Channel Palette took some getting used to on my part - remembering to hit the “save” button, and only save to TIFF or PSD files - but once I got it under my skin, this proved invaluable for saving multiple versions of a mask as alpha channels. (This is perhaps the only major advantage of the Color Range over the straight use of selection tools only.)

Once I moved a selection to a new multi-layer target image, the Mask Palette would come into play. Usually, there would be additional work to be done, aka blending the “imported” object now being built into a new layer –details like getting rid of bluish edges embedded in the object. Creating a pixel-based mask associated with that layer opens access to the Mask Palette, to take care of exactly this sort of edits. And since the Mask Palette only sees the active layer being edited, it makes it possible to invoke the Color Range command from here again, and work on the selected object now confined to a layer.

Removing background from images

On to creating a Happy Halloween card! I practiced Color Range technique when selecting the outline of a pumpkin character, but the black background and the “almost black” rim of the pumpkin hat made it impossible to create a good mask, as the dark-gray rim would come out as a “reveal” area on the mask. Finally, I came up with a trick to accomplish this – went into the RGB channel, selected the hat rim only using magnetic lasso selection tool, and then inverted the selection turning is almost white now. This made the image ready for creating a better mask. I switched to Channel Mask and selected the mask, then worked on filling up thinning areas inside the mask mostly with brush tool. Done? Not quite. Now, I needed to go back into the RGB channel, select the hat rim area again (same magnetic lasso tool) and invert the selection back to the original (dark gray). Finally, I had both - a perfect mask, without permanently modifying the original image. The magnetic lasso tool did a marvelous job in making the two consecutive selections look identical. Once transferred into the target background image, I had to open Mask Palette mode in the new layer and enter Color Range mode, in order to better blend the edges of the pumpkin.

Overall, I found creating a mask through the Color Range command to be very demanding. It exponentially increases the complexity of the selection process, because one has to worry not only about making a precise selection in terms of the contours of the object, but also about creating a good mask which involves making sure everything inside the selected areas turns black. Unless you start with a high-contrast background/foreground image, this is not easy to accomplish.

Clipping Mask method

In the spirit of this season, here comes another Happy Halloween card creation. The Clipping Mask method is a refreshingly simple way for creating a layered composition. I didn’t count the clicks, but it was as easy as one, two, three – get a background image, create a text layer and clip it with a dummy image layer that is to be “imprinted” on the card text. The Rosewood Std font offered in Photoshop is a 3D-like font type suitable for picking up enough of the clipped layer wallpaper on the resulting text, so I used it in this project. The “edit style” includes good assortment of pre-built options for text warping, one of them worked great for my card. With only modest investment in time, this method delivered wonderful effect.

The Adobe Help pages were sufficient for this basic project. For practical advice on more subtle aspects of Photoshop use, I like to search the Community Help searchable from the same portal – there you will find input on topics that Adobe Help alone does not address.

Multi-layered project

Here, I ventured to compose a layered image that captures the essence of my son Ian. The technical challenge of the project was removing three different objects from their original images. The Earth on black setting was the easiest selection to make, but the butterfly and Ian’s portrait made up for it in complexity. Color Range came up short in both cases, so I was back to magnetic lasso again, removing the background around both piece-by-piece. Archeological kind of work J Very time consuming, but worth it! I had now nice, clean components to build the composition. Building these as new layers in the target image was straightforward – only Ian’s image needed a touch of blending through Mask Palette features. I experimented with gradient blending of different sort, but none of it won my heart, so I stayed with the undiluted version attached here. (Close second came the same composition, only with the Earth faded into background with “radial gradient” – not published.)

The resulting image is Ian at his best – imaginative, born explorer, ready to take on this world!