In the Masking and removing backgrounds in photoshop tutorial we learned how do grab a mask from the channels palette, and how to enhance it with curves, dodge and burn.

Sometimes you can get a jump start on a perfect mask, using the calculations command and masking with calculations.

We will use the same photo of the flower, just to stay in familiar territory, so if you have not download that photo, click on the image below a couple times and download the large version and load it into photoshop.

redflower channel masking photo

With the flower layer selected, go the to channels palette and from the image menu select the calculations command.

photoshop calculations command

Yeah, scary dialog time I know

All the calculations command allows you to do, is choose 2 channels and apply a blending mode, it’s realy not that scary now is it?.

What you do is select the two channels that are most different from eachother by using the source 1 and source 2 Channel dropdown lists. For this image, that would be the red channel for source 1 and the blue channel for source 2

Now we want to apply a blending mode that creates a target alpha channel (Mask) with the most contrast. This is largely a trial and error kinda deal. You know you are looking for something that makes the background black, and the object you want to mask white, or the other way around. What’s black and what’s white doesn’t matter, since you can always just hit control+i to invert the resulting mask.

To get a feel for what will happen, go through the list of blending modes in the blending modes dropdown list and watch what happens. Also, for each blending mode you select, try checking off the Invert checkboxes and see what happens. This is why I told you it’s largely a trial and error process. Nobody is going to remember what each blending mode will do with invert on/off for all the modes since the effect they will have is dependant on the colors and luminace in the image and no two will be alike.

Many times though, the blending mode that is only available here in the calculations command.. Add is going to work, and that’s the one we will use for this tutorial.

Select the red channel for source 1 and the blue channel for source 2. Set the blending mode to Add, opacity to 100 (Opacity is rarely changed ffrom 100%), Offset to -200 and leave the Scale set at 1. Lastly, put a checkmark in invert for the Blue channel.

Hey, would you look at that, that looks like the start of a super mask.

Make sure the Result dropdown listbox is set to New Channel which is the default unless you changed it, and hit OK.

calculations channelmask 1

Now’s the time for some curves to bump up the white and blacks, so hit control+m.

Set the black input levels to 120 and the white input levels to 225, that’s what I found the best compromise. Feel free to play around and see if you can make it better and then hit OK.

photoshop calculations curves

Now we burn the grey areas like we already learned, and dodge the white areas to further enchance the white and black areas. The process is the same, but notice this time you don’t have the problems with the ratty edges, and the grey background and white flower responds much better to the dodge and burn tools, making the whole process a lot faster.

I’m going to stop with the images showing progressions of the mask, you should be flying through the mask by now anyway

Take care of the rest of the background by painting it over with black and paint the inside of the flower white.

Invert the mask to check if you got everything. Nope, still some stuff there. A quick dodge and burn and that goes away with no effort.

Invert the mask back again, control click on it to load it as a selection and go back to the layers palette. Doubleclick the background layer to turn it into a normal layer, and with the selection still active click on add layer mask.

Add a black background behind the masked out flower and notice that this time we have no background bleed either. Using calculations for masking made our masking job much faster and painless.

Now you are ready to read: Masking in the LAB Color space (Advanced)

First, lets look at some of techniques that many people use, that are usually the wrong way. I say usually, because there will be times when you have to work with low quality images with jpeg artifacts and just unfortunate backgrounds that makes the right way impossible. Once you learn how photos that will be masked in post production are made the right way, you will learn when to apply the different techniques.

Creating a layer mask and brushing on it with white and black to remove the background.

This takes way to much time and the mask will always be sub-par and sloppy.

Using quick selection tools.

Unless the object you want to mask out is on a pure colored background these tools will give you ratty and jaggy edges that will never blend right when you composite them into other backgrounds.

Quick mask

Same problem as with brushing on a layer mask, to time consuming and sub-par sloppy results.

Whenever possible, try to get the highest quality photo to work with. Jpeg compression is the enemy of great masks so if at all possible get the RAW files to work from. If you have any control over the photographer, instruct him/her to take photos against solid colored backgrounds. If photos are taken outside where that’s not always possible, a blue sky works great and it’s useually just a matter of the photographer finding the right spot to make sure the subject is framed against the sky.

So what’s the right way?

Channel masking, also called Found masks because these masks are found within the image itself.

Start out by downloading this photo of a flower that we will be using for this tutorial. It’s a moderately difficult image that won’t deter us by being to difficult while we are learning these techniques. Click on it a few times until you get to the large version and download that one.

redflower channel masking photo

Before we go further, since we will be using brush tools to enhance the mask there’s a few shortcuts you MUST learn if you want to work fast. Left/Right bracket will resize your brush. Shift+left/right brackets will change the hardness of your brush. Channel masking without learning and using these shortcuts will be very frustrating because you will be constantly changing brush size and hardness, it’s your choice but you have been warned.

Load up the image in photoshop and lets go to the channels palette (windows/channels)

What you see now, is how photoshop actually sees your photos, as grayscale channels. At the top we have the composite channel, labelled RGB since we are in the RGB color space. In RGB, you have a red green and a blue channel and in each channel levels of luminance, or light. The brighter an area is, the brighter that color is in that area. So if you see bright areas in the red channel, you know it’s bright red in that area, and if you see dark areas, you know there’s dark red red in that area. The green and blue channel works the same way. Photoshop then stacks these 3 channels on top of each other and we get the full color RGB image.

We might as well learn some shortcuts for selecting the channels while we are at it. Hit control+1 to select the red channel, control+2 for the green, and control+3 for the blue, and finally hit the tilde key to select the RGB composite. Try holding down control and hitting 1,2,3 – this is called channel walking.

Now what are we doing here in the channels view? We want to find the channel with the most contrast between the background that we want to mask out and the subject we want to keep.

Remember how a mask works in photoshop? Whatever is white is revealed, and what ever is black is hidden, and levels of grey in between defines transparency, so if you have an area in a mask that’s 50% grey, it’s 50% transparent.

OK so let’s find a good channel. hit control+1 and you see the red channel. It’s very bright where the flower is, because the flower is red. Hit control+2 and control+3 to check out the green and blue channels. As you can see they are very dark so they will not be useful, our candidate channel is the red one.

Now we want a copy of the red channel, we can’t mess with the original because that will change the colors in the image. Drag the red channel down to the new channel icon to create a copy of it and rename the channel to Flower Mask

As we want to create a mask from this channel we need a way to enhance the black and white areas, for that we need the curves command so hit control+m to bring it up.

If you don’t know the curves command don’t worry, all we need is the black and white input sliders down there in the bottom. Dragging the input sliders maps more and more of the luminance to either black or white. Drag the black input slider so the value says 130. For this particular image we won’t get any closer by messing with the white input but many images will need some white levels remapped, every image will be different. When you adjust the white and black levels keep a close eye on fine edges in your mask, dragging to far into the middle will create jaggy and harsh transitions, this is something you will learn with experience.

OK out of the curves dialog box for now.

redflower1 curves

Now we are getting somewhere, still not perfect though. We need to turn the darker grays around the edges of the flower to black and the outer edges of the flower to white.

We can do that with the dodge and burn tools. First we need to make sure they are setup correctly. Switch to the dodge tool and make sure the range is set to Highlights, then switch to the burn tool and make sure the range is set to shadows.

Switch to the burn tool, make sure the brush is set a hardness of zero, because we want soft gentle edges.

Now slowly start a bit out from the white edge of the flower and CLICK, don’t click and drag as that will smudge the edges to much, just click a couple times and you will see the gray stuff go away slowly. If you see the white edge of the flower go darker just hit O to switch the the dodge tool and hit the white edge a couple times to bring it up, then hit O again to go back to the burn tool. Work your way around the edge of the flower until you have a nice dark gap all the way around.

redflower1 curves dodge and burn

Let’s clean up the mask a bit before we go work on the white areas of the flower itself. Hit B to select your brush tool, make sure the foreground color is set to black, and now since we have a nice gap around the flower we can paint the background black without worrying about hitting the flower.

redflower1 mask blackbackground

If there’s still some grey stuff around the edge take care of that now with the burn tool.

Now go around the outside of the flower with the dodge tool and make it white, remember to click and never drag. Once the outside is white switch to the brush tool and select white for the foreground color and quickly paint the inside white.

redflower1 raggyedges

OK, getting there now. There’s still some rattyness of a few edges that won’t play ball because the image was shot with a large aparture so the edges blurr a bit, that’s how it goes so lets fix that up. Zoom in and select a small brush and make sure it’s set to white and make the hardness 100% now as we want to paint nice clean edges.

Now doubleclick on your mask layer, that brings up the channel options dialog box. Since the flower is red we don’t want red for the channel options, click on the color swatch and select a nice deep blue that’s not to dark and set the Opacity to 90% and hit OK

Nothing happened yet, but click on the eyeball of the RGB composite, important DON’T click the layer, click on the eyeball only. Now you get a rubylith overlay, well bluelith overlay since you changed the overlay color to blue but whatever..

Be aware that Photoshop has an annoying habit of flipping the background and foreground colors when you activate the overlay so if your painting with black all of a sudden instead of white, that’s what happened, just hit x to switch back to white.

Now you can see the original unmasked image behind the overlay making it easy to see where to paint to fix up the edges.

Paint with white to reveal anything that is part of the flower and paint with black to hide the background where the mask is still ratty. TIP TIME.. To easily make straight lines with the brush tool just hold down shift and click once to set the start point and lift the brush to the endpoint, don’t let go of shift and you can keep clicking to create nice straight lines and quickly take care of the ratty edges.

Almost done

redflower1 mask cleanup

If you want to make absolutely sure there’s nothing that needs cleanup hit control+i with the mask selected to invert it

redflower1 mask lastinspection

Oh dear, that needs to be fixed.

There, much better, perfect mask.

redflower1 mask last inspection clean

All we need to do now is invert the mask back, so hit control+i again.

redflower1 mask done

Now to put this bad boy into play. Control click on the mask to make a selection from it.

redflower1 mask selected

Now go back to your layers palette with the selection active. If the photo layer is named background doubleclick on it and just hit OK to the dialog that pops up, that turns it into a normal layer.

Now with the selection still active click on Add Layer Mask icon below the layers palette and marvel at your perfect mask.

Is it perfect though? Hard to see now, so lets add a new layer and fill it with black and drag it below the masked out flower layer.

Hmm, those edges could need a fixup.

redflower1 lastcheck

Select the mask (Not the layer, but the mask beside it) and go to filters/blur/Gaussian blur and enter 1 for the radius value and hit OK.

Now with the mask still selected hit control+m and pull the black input level slider in towards the middle and you will choke the mask, adjust until the green background bleed is gone and you are done.

Told you it was going to be a long one. If you made it down here pat yourself on the back, good job. With a little more practice and you can now mask images better than probably 80% of photoshop users. (Numbers made up, actual percentages may wary)

If you are thinking that this is tedious and time consuming it’s because you are still trying to keep all this stuff in your head and stumbling along. This and similar images takes me about 5-8 minutes tops because I don’t have to thing about what I’m doing anymore, keep at it you’ll get there.

When you are ready to move on and have channel masking down, have a look at my other articles about masking:

Masking with calculations in photoshop
Masking in LAB Color space
Difference masks for Product photography
Combining 2 or more masks in photoshop
You can also stay up to date with the masking and selections category

Here’s my take on how to create fake bloom in photoshop.

First duplicate your original layer.

Now go to filters/blur/lens blur. Set the radius high, around 80 or so and adjust the specular highlight brightness so the brightest areas of the photo blows out. Play around with curvature and rotation if you like. Be aware that the lens blur filter is dog ass sloooow so expect to wait a while on large images. Ok the changes.

The reason we use lens blur and not gausian blur like so many other tutorials is that we want to emulate as closely as possible the effect of bloom in camera and gausian blur will just not be realistic.

Now turn of all but this new layer, we are going to use it to create what is called a “found mask”, a mask that is derived from the image with no brushwork. Go the the channels palette and select the blue layer and drag a copy of it to the new channel icon below the channels palette. Name your new layer “bloom mask” and then hit control+m to open up the curves dialog box.

In the curves dialog box grab the black input triangle below the grid and drag it a bit towards the middle, you want to make the black areas of the bloom mask channel black, don’t go to far as that will create harsh transitions. Grab the white input slider and drag that a bit towards the middle also, not to much, just enough that you see some of the brightest areas go all white. Ok out of the curves dialog box.

Go back to your layers palette and delete the blurred layer, we are done with that. Select the original layer and hit control+j to jump a new copy of it. With the new copy selected, go back to the channels palette and control+click on the bloom mask channel to create a selection from it.

Go back to the layers palette and now click on the add layer mask icon below the layers palette and you have created your “found mask” layer.

Set the layers blending mode to screen and watch the bloom come alive. If the bloome areas are to sharp, select the layer mask and hit it with some gausian blur to smooth it out. You can also try selecting the layer and add a hue/saturation adjustment layer and adjust the colors to be a bit more yellow to simulate sunlight bloom better.

If you realy want to hit this effect over the head, select the channel mask on the layer and drag it to the trashcan icon, when asked, select “apply mask” before deleting. Now select the bloom layer and add some motion blur, adjust the angle of the motion blur so it follows the direction of the light, this creates cool “god rays” and can look amazing on sunshine landscape photos, if the rays become to streaky, hit the layer with some gausion blur after you apply the motion blur.

You may also want to try some other blending modes than screen to see if you get effects that you like, the possibilities are endless.

The way I do it I simply hit control+j to jump a new copy of the original layer, draw a selection around the speculars that offends on this new layer, bring up the gausian blur and adjust the radius to wipe out the specular. Sometimes before I do this I feather the selection a bit.

This works great for very smooth surfaces like glass and metal. But what if you’r product has a pronounced texture that the blur will also smooth out and make it obvious what’s been done?

Model retouching uses a great technique to smooth out skin, you simply blur the skin, then add back the amount of texture on top needed to make the skin believeable again, and it’s very simple.

First blur the specular like described above. Make sure you save the selection you draw around the specular. Now select the original layer that’s not been blurred, bring back your selection and hit control+j to jump a copy. Drag the copy so it’s above the blurred version. Put this copy into soft light blending mode. From the filters menu select other/highpass.

The soft light blending mode uses neutral gray to denote transparent, so everything that’s grey will simply not be visible. The highpass filter makes everything but sharp contrasting edges grey, the higher the amount, the more of the image will show through, so you want to adjust the filter so the amount of texture you want “escapes” and shows through. You can think of this technique as a sieve for the texture, the larger the highpass radius, the larger pieces of the texture can fall through the sieve.

Sometimes soft light is not hard enough so if your texture is not showing properly try the hard light, vivid light or liniar light blending modes instead.

The canvas size dialog is fine if you know the exact dimensions, but what if you want to recompose an image and want to visualize your resizing?

Enter the photoshop crop tool.

First make sure you change the background layer to a normal layer, just hold down the ALT key and doubleclick the layer, voila.

Now hit C to get your crop tool out and drag over the whole image. Click on the “Clear” to clear all dimension restrictions.

Now simply drag the corners of your image to get the size you want and hit enter when done. Your original image is left untouched, photoshop just adds move pixels around the original so no pixel is harmed.

This is done by skillfull retouchers using dodge and burn in Photoshop. Basically you have to learn about light and shadow and how they shape an image. For example wrinkles in skin, if you zoom all the way in to a single wrinkle you will notice that it’s nothing but shadow and light. Dodge the shadow part and burn the light part of the wrinkle and it will dissapear like magic, but it’s just manipulation of shadow and light.

Look at a model shot. Notice facial features like cheekbones, the curves on the body etc.. Now try to burn the shadows and dodge the light areas, just look at the image and you will see how they fall. If you want to enhance a feature simply darken the existing shadows and lighten the existing light areas and you will notice that the shape is greatly enhanced.

Look at clothes on a model. Zoom in and carefully enhance the existing light and shadows in the wrinkles of the clothes and you will notice that they take on a silky smooth look, all light manipulation.

When using the dodge and burn, make sure you set your brush to be as soft as possible and work at 10% opacity, just build up slowly and the magic will happen after some practice. When you get realy good at dodging and burning, you can actually add body features that were not even there in the first place. For example if a model needs some more muscles or muscle definition you can dodge and burn to create shadows and highlights that looks exactly like the model had extra muscles. Try burning a leg softly in the middle of a large leg muscle that’s round, you will see you get close to something that looks like a defined muscle where none was before.

The great thing about using dodge and burn to enhance shape instead of the liquify command, is that you are not actually moving pixels, so looking at before and after images won’t show any pixel manipulation, it will just look like lighting has changed.

What’s that you say? Don’t have a steady hand? Ok, here’s a trick that will work for larger areas like hips, joints, cleaveage (Boobies) and lot’s of other stuff, but practice your hand drawn dodge and burn, it will set you apart from many others and is a very valuable skill.

First decide on the shape, rectangular or round, rectangular for things like joints, torso, and round for things like shoulder joints and boobies (I love saying that, booooobies heh)

Let’s start with rectangular since it’s easier to understand.

We want to make an arm look round and CG like. Draw a rectagular shape with the marque tool on a layer above the subject, then select transform selection to make the ractagular selection match the shape to enhance, an arm for example,just match the shape roughly no need to fiddle to much. No go to fill and select 50% gray. Select the layer blending mode and set it to “soft light”. That made the gray go away, that’s okay.

Now doubleclick the layer to open the blending options dialog. Click on Gradient Overlay and set the style to “reflected”, check the “reverse” checkbox and set the scale all the way to 150%. You now need to play with the angle to make the direction of the light match the angle of the shape you want to enhance, for example a models arm you want to make the angle of the light match the angle of the arm.

Lastly from the Gradient overlay “blending modes” dropdown select soft light again and OK out of the blending modes dialog box.

Now you have a shape enhancing gradient layer. Try moving it around (Hit V and drag it around) and see how it enhances the shape of the underlying image. Since it’s light in the middle and dark at the sides, it will create more “roundness”, creating that CG look.

Well it doesn’t fit very well now does it? Position the layer over the arm of the model so it fits as well as you can make it. Convert your layer to a smart object (Layer/Smart object/Convert to). Now hit Control+t to free transform the layer. Context click somewhere inside the transformation rectangle, and select “Warp”. Now drag the different areas around so your shape layer fits the arm and hit enter to commit the changes. If you need to adjust the warping later, since we converted to a smart object you can adjust the transform as many times as you want without degrading anything, the power of smart objects.

Last thing you need to do now is add some gausian blur to wipe out the hard edges on your shape enhancing layer, or you can add a layer mask and with a soft brush set to 10% opacity mask out the hard edge. I like the gausian blur method. Because the layer is already a smart object, you get the benefit of non-destructive filters that you can allways go back and tweak.

Another way to mask out the hard edges is to just ignore them while you work on the overall shape, then when you’r done select all the shape enhancing layers and hit control+g to group them. Finally add a layer mask to the whole group and go to town masking out any hard edges.

To realy finetune the shape enhancing layers, turn off the layer with your subject, so only the shape enhancing layers are visible. Then hit shift+control+e to merge them all into a single layer. That turns off the soft light blending mode so just turn it back on for the merged layer and then hide all the originals. Now open up filters/Liquify, turn on the backdrop so you can see your subject. You won’t see the effect of the blending mode in the liquify dialog but don’t worry about that. Now use a low brush pressure and brush density around 10-15 and the forward warp tool to push the shape so the light and shadow flows better with the features of the subject.

For round shapes, you do the same steps, just start with a round selection, and in the blending modes dialog/Gradient overlay select “Radial” instead of reflected. Try to put the round shape over some chicks rack and see what happens

Have fun!

With your image ready for sharpening, select Nik Color EFX pro and locate the Tonal Contrast filter. The Tonal contrast filter sharpens your images with local contrast enhancement and is extremely presise. The settings are vary intuitive so just play around until the image is tack sharp.

OK out of the filter package and by default a new layer copy is created on top of your original image.

Since sharpening images with local contrast enhancement is so presise, any noise in your image will be picked up and exagerated. Select the shapened layer, hold down ALT and click on Add Layer Mask. This creates a hide all black layer mask, effectively removing all sharpening.

Now select the paintbrush tool (Hit B), hit 1 on your numerical keyboard to set the opacity to 10% and make sure your brush is set the a hardness of zero so it’s as soft as possible.

Now paint over the areas you want sharpened, paint multiple times to slowly build up the effect.

But we can fake rotating canvas pretty well with a little trick.

First convert your pixel layers (Non-adjustment layers) to smart objects.

Now put everything, pixel layers, adjustment layers etc.. into a group.

Now just select the group folder and hit control+t and you can rotate everything in the group and orient everything so it lines up better for brush work.

Since your pixel layers are smart objects you can rotate them as many times as you like without loosing any image data. When you are done with any brush work such as dodging and burning just reset the group layer orientation and voila.

To flick through the Crop Overlay modes, first hit the crop button in the develop module. Then hit the O key on your keyboard to flick through the modes.

You can also hit Shft+O the change the orientation of the various modes to fit the orientation of your image.

Happy cropping.

However, when you are working on large images, for example medium format RAWs every layer you jump eats HUGE amounts of ram, when you start with a 45MB original you realy want to keep the number of layers down to a minimum.

My favorite way that is adjustable and also takes very little RAM is to create one curves adjustment layer for the shadows, and another one for the highlights. After adding them, turn the shadow curves adjustment layer off and adjust the highlights, never mind that you are affecting the whole image, we will fix that in a sec. Then turn the highlights curves adjustment layer off and adjust the shadows layer.

Select the layer mask of both the curves adjustment layers and hit control+I to flip the mask to black. (If you, like me love shortcuts and can remember them, you can hold down alt when adding the layer mask and it will add a hide all (Black) layer mask)

Now just paint with a soft white brush set to 10% opacity on these layers to build up your dodge and burn.

Not only do you now have just a couple adjustment layers that takes up next to no RAM, you can at any time go back and re-adjust the overall tone of your dodging and burning and since you are using a curves adjustment layer you can even set control points in the curves to make them affect les or more of the overall tone in your dodging and burning.

I useually add both these adjustment layers to a group and then add a mask to the group. I paint in the shadows and highlights paying no mind to getting small halos around fine edges. Then when I’m done I use the group layer mask to fix up any halos I have because I painted over edges.