A Digital Demo--Page Seven: Layer Masks, Rulers and Guides, Edit/Transform
Kalamazoo College
Richard Koenig

Office Location: Light Fine Arts 203, Phone: 337.7003

To digital page
To my homepage

Layer Masks

Below, please find three uses of the layer mask.

This tool has many uses, but we'll just explore a couple of things here quickly...



Doppelganger--Two Left Feet

The creation of twins is easily done if one works with a tripod combined with manual settings (like I do when I shoot multi-image panoramas). If you work methodically while shooting, it's easy to then combine into a single image.

First, simply stack the two photographs as layers. (You may have to first rasterize the layer to do what I'm going to do here.) Next, use a layer mask to see through a portion of the top layer (to let a portion of the lower layer shows through).



Layer masks, when combined with the gradient tool, are also very useful when you want to fade from one picture to another: see the following two examples now...

With the first example, I intend to suggest that the legs of the fellow pictured transition into the water. In the second, the same picture is flipped horizontally and laid on top of itself (inverted as well). We then use the layer mask and the gradient tool to transition from one layer to another equally across the entire image.

Below these layer mask examples, you will find two different uses of rulers and guides. These are simple tools, but ones that I cannot live without (okay, a slight exaggeration).

please go here for all pictures used in the remaining tutorials on this page



He's in it up to his knees
    open "kelly" and "quarry2"

    work on kelly first...use the magic wand to slect the man

      set the tolerance to 32 (up in the options bar)

      to add the isolated part of the background to the selection,
      hold down the shift key and click in that area a second time

      remember, in cases like this (plain background)
      we first select the background, then go up to menu bar => select => inverse to get the "non-background"

    once you have kelly selected, paste him in the second image (quarry2)

      copy (comamnd "c")
      click on the other image (quarry2)
      paste (command "v")

    now we'll use the layer mask to feather the man into the water

      click quick mask mode (bottom of tool box)

      use the gradient tool to draw a line vertically from his bag to the bottom of this feet

      click the quick mask tool again

      hit delete

      command "d" will get rid of wanted "marching ants"

      done






Let's try the double-shower picture
    open "shower" in photoshop

    create a duplicate layer

    select top layer and do two things to it...

      invert (command "i")

      flip that layer horizontally

        when doing the flipping of a layer,as opposed to an image,
        use edit => transform => flip horizontal
        (rather than image=>image rotation)

    make color-picker black and white

    choose the gradient tool in the toolbox

    click "edit in quickmask mode" at bottom of toolbox

    draw a line across the image from left to right

    click out of quickmask mode...you should see marching ants

    hit the delete button

    now the bottom layer should show through...feathered nicely


Guides and Rulers
    first, make sure you can view rulers:

      menu bar, view, rulers

    use the move tool and go into the ruler area itself

    click on that ruler area and drag the mouse into the picture area (try the top)

    a guide will appear

    drag it to the middle of the image--it should snap to the exact center

    do the same from the side ruler, drag the guide to the center again

    use the guides in conjunction with markings on the rulers to create grids or to square things up

    with this first example, the individual pictures of the triptych will "snap to" the cross-hairs created by the guides

    (one can also align things by their edges, rather than their center)




Please make a horizontal triptych similar to the one above.


Square up a picture
    one uses rulers and guides to do this perfectly



before




after
    open the picture called "keystone"

    make a duplicate layer

    fill the bottom layer with white

      in the layers palette, click on the bottom layer, then go to menu bar, edit, fill, choose "white"

    click back up to the top layer and cut away the non-picture

      first select the picture/painting using paths to make the selection

        or use the polygonal lasso tool right now to be quicker

      then go to menu bar, select, inverse

      this will select the non-picture/painting...delete

    next, drag four guides into the image

    arrange/place the guides using the measurements on the rulers to make a perfect square (in this case)

    distort the top layer (picture/painting) to match the guides...

      menu bar, edit, transorm, distort

      force the picture/painting to conform to the perfect square created by the guides

    before you flatten, put in a nice drop shadow

Next Page
Back to Index Page