Adobe Photoshop CS5 for Photographers - Martin Evening [205]
Figure 9.22 shows the Masks panel options menu, where you can use the menu options shown here to add, subtract or intersect the current mask with an active selection. Imagine you want to add something to a selection you are working on. You simply choose the ‘Add Mask to Selection’ menu option to add it to the current selection.
Figure 9.22 The Masks panel controls are accessible from the menu circled in Figure 9.23.
Refine Edge command
The Refine Edge command is available foremostly as a Select menu item ( ) for modifying selections. The dialog says ‘Refine Edge’ when editing a selection, but if you are preparing a selection in order to create a mask, it makes more sense to use the Refine Edge command when you are working on an active layer mask. You can do this by clicking on the Mask Edge… button in the Masks panel, or by using the above keyboard shortcut. Whichever method you choose the controls are exactly the same, except the dialog is called ‘Refine Mask’ when editing a layer mask. The Refine Edge controls offer everything you need to modify a selection or layer mask edge. You will notice in Photoshop CS5 that the dialog now not only looks different, but features two new innovations. Firstly, it includes a new Truer Edge™ algorithm to enable complex outline masking, and secondly, it features output mask refinements for removing color contamination from a masked layer.
Refine Edge is a one-way process
Unlike the Masks panel, once Refine Edge adjustments have been applied they are non-editable after you click OK. For this reason you may want to take the precaution of preserving important mask outlines as saved channels before you use Refine Edge to modify a selection or mask. In any case, the new output options shown in Figure 9.24 below allow you to output a modified selection/mask in different ways, such as a new layer with a layer mask, or a new document even. With this in mind, you may also want to use the Masks panel Feather slider (which can be re-edited) as a primary means for feathering a mask outline.
View modes
When you first select Refine Edge (Figure 9.24), the initial view mode shows the layer masked against a white background, which isn't so helpful when editing a layer mask, but you can easily switch to the On Layers view by pressing and once you have done this I suggest you click on the Remember Settings button at the bottom of the Refine Edge dialog to keep this as the new default setting. Without adjusting anything, click OK to close the dialog. You'll then see the On Layers appear by default the next time you open Refine Edge. In the subsequent tutorial (on pages 478–483) I suggest you do all your main Refine Edge adjustments using the ‘On Layers’ preview mode since this allows you to preview the adjustments you make in relation to the rest of the image. This and the other modes can be accessed from the popup menu shown on the right in Figure 9.24 and you'll notice the keyboard shortcuts are also listed here so that you can quickly switch between view modes. In the View Mode section at the top of the dialog, the Show Radius option ( ) displays the selection border only for where the edge refinement occurs, while the Show Original option ( ) allows you to quickly display the image without a selection preview (see Figure 9.25 for more details).
Figure 9.24 The Refine Edge dialog.
Figure 9.25 This shows examples of how the Radius and original image view modes might be used. Here you can see an image that has been masked using the On White mask view mode. On the left you can see how the masked image looks using the current Refine Edge settings. In the middle is the preview with the Show Radius ( ) option checked. This displays the refine edge boundary only. On the right is the preview with the Show Original ( ) option checked. This allows you to view the masked image and compare the original version against the refine edge masked version (left).
Edge detection
The Edge Detection section gives you some control over how the Truer Edge™ algorithm processing is used