Adobe Photoshop CS5 for Photographers - Martin Evening [163]
Editing a mask using the Masks panel
1.
You can add a vignette in Photoshop by adding a darkening Levels (or Curves) adjustment, making an elliptical selection and filling the pixel mask with black.
2.
If you go to the Masks panel you can increase the Feather amount to make the hard mask edge softer.
3.
Let's say I wanted to soften the transition between the masked and unmasked areas. By decreasing the Density one can make the black areas of the mask lighter and thereby reveal more of the adjustment effect in the center of the image.
4.
This technique is not just limited to pixel masks. This last step shows how I could have started with a subtractive elliptical pen path shape, applied this as a Vector Mask and used the same Masks panel settings as in Step 2 to soften the mask edge.
Color Range adjustment layer masking
1.
In this example I wanted to demonstrate how to use the Masks panel controls in conjunction with an image adjustment to modify the image shown here so that I could simultaneously control the adjustment effect and the adjustment masking. To start with, I added a new Hue/Saturation adjustment layer. I then went to the Masks panel and clicked on the Color Range button, which opened the Color Range dialog shown here. With the ‘Localized Color Clusters’ option checked, I used the plus eyedropper tool to add color samples to the selection, sampling the blues in the central area of the photograph, while avoiding the walls. I then adjusted the Fuzziness and Range till I was happy with the way the selection looked and clicked OK to the Color Range selection.
2.
I then went to the Masks panel and feathered the selection, adding a 50 pixel feather. You can see a preview of the mask in both the small Masks panel preview as well as in the Layers panel. All I needed to do now was to adjust the Hue/Saturation sliders in the Adjustments panel. For this step I decided to make some of the blue colors more green and reduced the color saturation slightly. The main thing to learn from this particular example is that you can switch back and forth between the Adjustments panel and the Masks panel to re-edit the adjustment effect and masking. When you combine the ease of adjustment editing with the power of the new Masks panel and Color Range selections, Photoshop has the potential to allow you to make selections and modify images like never before.
Blend mode adjustments
You can use blend modes to modify an image by adding an adjustment layer above the Background layer, or at the top of the layer stack, and simply changing the blend mode to Screen (to lighten), Multiply (to darken) or Overlay (to add contrast). You don't need to apply a specific type of image adjustment, just add a neutral adjustment layer (any will do) and select one of the above layer blending modes. It is possible to achieve the same types of results by duplicating the Background layer and changing the blend mode of the duplicate layer as shown in Figure 5.59. However, this is actually quite unnecessary and you'll end up with an image that is twice the file size. If you instead add an adjustment layer (as shown in Figure 5.60) this only increases the file size by a few kilobytes.
Figure 5.59 Here is the first of two examples showing how you can use blend modes to adjust an image. In this example I dragged the Background layer down to the New Layer panel button to make a duplicate layer and changed the layer blending mode from Normal to Screen. When the image was saved, the file size doubled to 64 MB.
Figure 5.60 In this example I added a new Levels adjustment layer, but didn't apply any changes to the Levels settings. I then changed the adjustment layer blend mode from Normal to Screen. Both this and the Figure 5.59 example produced identical results, but this time the file size was only increased by 57 kilobytes.
Overlay alternatives
Instead of using