The basic premise of a mask is to eliminate portions of an image from view, without actually affecting the image itself. A mask can be applied to a single layer or a group. Masks operate with simple rules: dark masks, and light reveals, with the shades of gray masking relative to their darkness.

For absolutely no reason at all, I’m going to demo masking by replacing a man’s head with a giraffe’s.

The two photos I used to create this came from my favorite stock photo site, sxc.hu.

• Man in costume with tie 5
• Giraffe Close-up (props to Johnathan By)

There are multiple ways to apply layer masks, but I’ve found only one to be really practical. Since I always have my Layers palette open, I use the button at the bottom specifically for this.

If you have a selection active, and then click this button, it will mask everything outside of what you have selected–a quick way to do masks too. Oftentimes, I will apply the mask, and then proceed to begin masking using the Brush tool, selections, or gradients.

The mask used here was applied to the picture of the giraffe’s head, to eliminate the background in the image, and also to mask around the collar of the man’s shirt. Essentially, what’s happening is something like this:

The result is not exactly satisfactory, though.

I’ve got some of the man’s head still peeking out, so in order to correct that, I’m going to use the Clone tool with a large-sized Soft Mechanical brush from the Basic Brushes set to wipe his face out. This is where carefully selecting a good picture comes in handy–a more complex background would require a lot more effort to eliminate his face.

The final touch is to use the Burn tool around the bottom of the giraffe’s neck near the collar to add some shadowing for a more-convincing merging between the giraffe and the man’s clothes.

The final result, again:

Some general tips when doing this sort of work:

• Keep proportions in mind and do your best to get everything sized properly before beginning to mask.
• When hunting for pictures for this type of composition, I find it’s best to use tabbed browsing to quickly flip back and forth to size up whether the angles, lighting, and various other factors will be workable. Pick a primary image, from which the suitability of other pictures will be judged against. The suit was the primary picture in this case, and I searched for giraffes that were looking in a realistic direction similar to the man’s.
• When masking, the keyboard shortcut for switching from foreground to background colors is typing “x”–this lets you quickly mask and unmask portions, giving you lots more flexibility while using the brush tool.

I’ll continue to discuss the myriad uses of masks in another tutorial, focusing on the ways textured brushes and gradients can create some really stunning compositions.

Photocompositions are one of the primary uses of photoshop: to integrate seamlessly several images to produce a new reality represented in the resulting image. Look through your Sunday advertisements, I guarantee you will find dozens of instances of this; this morning I found the Hulk sitting on a couch to watch his namesake film with a family in a Best Buy ad.

The foremost challenge to creating images of this nature is that the photos to be integrated have to have a kind of interplay already. When dealing with objects that will interact with each other, they must be able to achieve realistic proportion, form and lighting. To some extent, we can manipulate these three factors, but in the end, if the photo isn’t right, those efforts will be moot.

I’ll be going through some basic concepts and steps to create this composition I put together.
View full-size here.

I used 4 images from stock.xchng, my favorite stock photo site: the sink, the hole, the wall texture, and the head.

I began with the sink image as my foundation. The lack of vertical perspective (seeing into the sink or under the sink) can be challenging or very easy to work with, depending on the availability of photos that compliment this angle. Many of the texture sets on stock.xchng are taken head-on, with no vertical perspective, so using the Distort or Perspective from Edit > Transform can very easily allow them to match up with whatever vertical and horizontal perspectives you’re working with.

In my case, I needed only to put the texture above my sink layer and set layer blending to Linear Burn. All that was left was to apply a mask to the texture layer and mask out the sink area.

Next up was the insertion of the head. Thinking of the shape of the sink, I figured that the head wouldn’t be able to sit in it totally upright. I rotated and then masked accordingly, trying to achieve a natural look to the way the head was positioned in the sink. I lucked out on the lighting used in the original photo, as the directions of light and shadow is mostly accurate. Watching out for shadows and dark areas on photos you plan to integrate is a major consideration to make. As best as you can, try to approximate the direction that the light source is coming from, and judge its suitability from there. Many times, it doesn’t make or break an image since the application of the Burn and Dodge tool can fix it enough so as to be less noticeable.

It’s missing a little something–shadows. On two layers, one above the head and one below, I added shadows using the brush tool to add a shadowcast on the wall behind the head and one on the head from the inside edge of the sink.

The last component was the hole in the wall. This particular photo is a real find, since it appears to be without any vertical perspective, but has a slight amount of horizontal perspective to show off the great textures along the inside of the wall where the hole was made. After setting the hole layer blending to Multiply, I positioned the image where I wanted, and masked everything on that layer except the hole itself. I used the Dry Media brush set that comes with Photoshop to touch up the mask around the hole.

All in all, it is a simple photocomposition, but the more elements that are added, the more important it becomes that a cohesive balance is kept in regards to the three principles I mentioned earlier: proportion, form and lighting. I continued to embellish the image and arrived to this final composition–perfectly spooky for Halloween!

If you need a dynamic way to wrap or curve a line or whole blocks of text, Photoshop is perfectly capable of catering to your every need. A seemingly uncommon demand for a raster-based image application, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve used the following techniques.

They all center around paths, a vector-based function; text entered into Photoshop is also vector-based. Paths are essentially ways to establish a boundary that some action can be applied to. Most often, its used for masking or shape fills. Today, we’ll be using it to fill with text!

Since it’s October already, let’s try to get some text to wrap around a pumpkin–the end result will look something like this:

First, you’ll want to have your pen tool activated, with the “paths” option, “rectangle” function, and “add” option all selected:

Now, draw a rectangle in the area you want the text to appear in, overlapping the part you don’t want it to include. We’ll cut that area out in a sec:

Now, here’s the key: we want to get rid of the portion that’s overlapping. You can use the oval tool, or the pen tool to create an arc to your liking. BUT be sure you now have the “subtract” option selected:

Now comes the insertion of text. I find it most useful to type up my text in TextEdit/Notepad and paste it in. Have the text tool active, and click in the box path: you’ll notice it turns into the usual “I” shape, but with a dotted circle around it. Go ahead and paste or type your text. You’ll wind up with this:

On a Mac, “Command-Enter/return” will set your changes. The awesome thing is the path is also set, and you can resize the path like you would a regular text box, only it’ll retain the area you cut out!

Now, let’s do a single line of text, curving around the top and above the text we just added. This is easier to do. With the pen tool selected, draw a multi-point arc around the object:

Now, with the text tool, hover over the very beginning point of your arc, and click. You’ll notice, again, that it has that dotted circle around the I. Now type in or paste in your text. “Command-Enter/Return” will set the edit. If you wind up getting a selection active after, just deselect. You’ll wind up with this:

Now, you’ve got the text placed! You’ll notice that at the pivot point, things can get a little cramped, so if you so desire, you can do two paths, one for each word. Each path itself can be as wavy or angular as you like–customization is endless.

The final result, after some editing:

During a recent online worksession with Saulter, we were tossing around ideas for a graphic-based navigation bar for a current project. Using source photos of a variety of boxes, I wanted to quickly mask out the white background against which the boxes were photographed against. During times like these, when ideas are coming fast, sometimes I wish I could hold the digital image in my hands and use a pair of digital scissors to quickly snip it out. Until then, I’ve found the following to be the best way to cut out simple objects quick and dirty.

Masking Box from Tridea Design on Vimeo.

Here’s a side-by-side comparison of what Refine Edge can do.

In some cases, we need to remove a background that has a lot of tiny spaces. In the example below, I show how to get even the background color in all those tiny crevices out. It’s a very handy function, and also one of the fastest ways to handle something with this amount of complexity.

Masking Bonsai Tree from Tridea Design on Vimeo.

Here’s a view at the quality between a wand-tool selection for the mask against the Color Range + Refine Edge method.

Whether you know these tricks or not, I certainly hope you will make use of them in your next design comp! Until next time!