10
1
Enter QuickMask mode with q. Begin by using a hard-
edged brush to trace around the main body of the fly.
Don’t worry about the legs at this stage – we’ll add them in
later. Remember that if you make a mistake, you can always
swap the foreground color to white and paint it out.
7
Now exit QuickMask by pressing q again, and press
Cj Lj to make a new layer from this selection.
When we hide the underlying layers, we can see a few small
errors: a bit of background has crept into the wings.
4
Now for the legs. Switch to a much smaller (but still
hard-edged) brush, and trace each leg carefully. You can
change brush sizes by using ] to go to the next size up, and
[ to go to the next size down.
Q
UICKMASK IS THE BEST TOOL FOR
making complex selections, especially
of natural or organic objects where there are
no hard, straight edges. By switching between
large and small brushes, it’s easy to trace even
the most fiddly of objects with a little patience.
It all becomes more interesting when we
look at using shades other than pure black and
white to paint the mask. By painting with gray,
we create a mask which is semi-transparent:
the darker the shade, the more opaque the
resulting selection will be. This technique is
of particular benefit when selecting objects
such as this fly, which has an opaque body
and legs but semi-transparent wings. Building
that transparency into the selection makes the
whole effect far more convincing when we
place the fly on a new background: the lowered
opacity makes it look far more as if it belongs
in its new surroundings.
10
QuickMask 2: tips and tricks
IMAGE: HEMERA PHOTO-OBJECTS
1
Natural selection
SHORTCUTS
MAC WIN BOTH
11
HOT TIP
Why didn’t we
simply paint with
a lower brush
opacity in step
5, rather than
switching to gray?
Because if we had,
we would have
had to paint the
whole of each
wing in a single
brushstroke,
without
interruption.
Otherwise, the
new stroke would
have overlapped
the old one,
creating a darker
area (and so a
stronger opacity)
in the intersection.
11
2
We could just paint in the middle of the body – but with a
large selection, that would take a while. Here’s a shortcut:
use the Magic Wand tool to select the middle portion, then
expand that selection (Select menu) by, say, 4 pixels to make
sure the edges are covered.
8
The easiest way to fix this is simply to erase the offending
areas with a hard-edged Eraser. If you prefer, you could
go back to QuickMask and tidy it up there, but it generally isn’t
worth the extra effort.
5
Before painting the wing area, we need to switch
from black to a dark gray color to give the wings their
transparency. Choose a gray from the Swatches panel, and,
with a bigger brush, paint over the wings.
3
Now fill that new selection with the foreground color (the
shortcut for doing this is O B A B)
and then deselect (Cd Ld) to remove the Magic Wand
selection. This is a useful technique for large images
in particular.
9
Because we selected the wing area using built-in
transparency, we can partially see through them when
we place the fly on a different background, adding greatly to
the realism of the scene.
6
The wings may need to be semi-transparent, but those
fine legs shouldn’t be – so switch back to black (press
d) and, with a small brush, paint in the legs where they’re
seen through the wings.
How to Cheat in Photoshop CC
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