# What is a Mask? (photshop)



## nb3004 (May 11, 2003)

What is a mask and why would you use it?  I use photoshop a lot and consider myself decent at it so this has always bothered me.


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## BoneFill (May 11, 2003)

WHAT???  

Well you know, there ara morre than 8 tools for doing masks in almost every app like photoshop...

The magic wand may be the most representative but it is not a very helpful (at least for me)  

Masks are used tu protect some areas of an image... you can make a mask with glue to retouch a real printed photograph...


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## toast (May 11, 2003)

Maybe you mean QuickMask.
http://www.icehousedesigns.com/tutorials/photoshop/quickmask.php


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## nb3004 (May 11, 2003)

Wow, ive been using them all the time and didnt know the name, i feel kinda dumb, but not really.


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## potter__ (May 15, 2003)

Sorry to only post now in mid may but I just found your post... I figure since you want to learn about masking you might like this...

There is a button on the bottom of the layers pallette that is a dark grey box with a light grey circle in it... this is the layer mask tool. When you have, lets say a photo, and you apply the layer mask, you now control what areas of the photo are visible and not. Use the erase tool and the brush tool to mask areas of the image which you want. this took can be very helpful when you want to keep the whole image for editing in the future or when you are doing a set of images where all are slightly different, you can set up a template and change each one seperatly.

Any more Questions,
Feel free to email at 
matthew_potter@sympatico.ca


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## Arden (May 15, 2003)

Masks control what is visible in a layer, and by how much.  They take an alpha layer, with any shade of gray between black (transparent) and white (opaque) determining opacity.  If you have a mask on an layer and it is all 50% gray, that layer will be half transparent.

Look for web sites on Photoshop and see what they say about masks.  All good websites should go into depth, but all will probably have something different to say.  There are almost as many different ways to implement masks as to use them; they make layers infinitely more useful.


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## larry98765 (May 15, 2003)

Mask Tips:

The great thing about masks is that you can paint on black to block areas of the layer and white to reveal. Just keep one hand on the "x" key, and you can easily switch between black and white (or whatever foreground, background color you have chosen -- hit "d" for the default colors: black and white). If you're masking, say, the background out of a photo of a person, this makes mistakes easy to correct.

Also try: using gradients on a mask or painting in shades of gray onto the mask.


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## Natobasso (May 30, 2003)

I use masks to create "clipping paths" around objects so when I import that graphic to a page layout program I only see the object, not what's around it. You can do that one better by creating a Mask and hiding everything around the object then you can actually paint and add to your mask and obscure or show more of the object. Hence, you can fix your "path" on the fly without erasing or changing the image at all. 

One great example of this. I got to my current job and a genius decided to shoot our white porcelain product on a "Green Screen", literally. So there was a green caste on everything! Ugh. Using the mask tool helped me to not only remove the shoddy job they had done of selecting the green with the magic wand (it does a poor job of discerning between "green" and "green on white porcelain that gradually fades to white", leaving a jagged edge. Yuk again!


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## Arden (May 30, 2003)

Another trick is to create a layer mask, then use the vector mask tool to draw a bezier curve around an object that will eventually be masked out.  I haven't actually used this feature, but I know it's there and it's probably quite powerful.


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