AV News 184 - May 2011
Photoshop CS5 - Masking Techniques
Keith Scott FRPS
Mention masking techniques to many younger members of photographic clubs
or perhaps Audio-Visual groups, especially to those that have come into the
hobby quite recently i.e. straight into the digital age and they will automatically
assume that you are talking about functions within Adobe Photoshop.
However people of a more senior age and especially experienced
darkroom workers will be fully au fait with producing masks by a much more
traditional and messy process. Photographic masks are nothing new; they
have been with us in one form or another almost since the beginning of
photography. For many years conventional masks consisted of high contrast
film processed in highly
active developer, fixed in
hypo and then painted when
dry with liquid opaque.
Depending
on
their
intended purpose masks
could be hard or soft edged,
or used for image contrast
control. Unfortunately the lith
film commonly used for this
purpose was notorious for
containing tiny pin holes,
hence the need for liquid
opaque to spot out such
imperfections. Masks could
and still can be either negative or positive and simple in principle, especially
when merely contact printed onto a piece of lith film. However traditional masks
could also be very difficult to produce accurately if any degree of painting was
necessary around fine detail using liquid opaque, especially on small 35mm
format images. Most AV workers used such masks in their simplest form to
produce title slides (usually starting this procedure with laying down and
photographing Letraset Transfers) sometimes sandwiching the subsequent
mask with gels to produce coloured text on screen. Thankfully due to the ease
and convenience of modern computers such messy and time consuming
processes are a thing of the past; however the principle of applying masks to
our image remains the same. We use masks to block out those areas of an
image that we need to hide and to allow visibility of those areas we need to
show.
Adobe Photoshop is renowned for having several ways of achieving most
things and masking is no exception. Different methods of making masks can
be employed, each suiting a different situation or perhaps different operator
preference. Regardless of which method is used the secret of good masking is
all about accurate selection and accurate painting i.e. we need to accurately
select or paint out something that we wish to hide thereby accurately leaving
the remainder that we wish to display.
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