A Digital Demo--Page Seven, Layer Masks, Rulers, and Guides Kalamazoo College Richard Koenig Office Location: Light Fine Arts 203, Phone: 337.7003 To digital page To my homepage

Layer Masks, then use of Rulers and Guides Below, please find two uses of the layer mask. This tool is great when you want to fade from one picture to another. With the first example, I intend to suggest that the legs of the fellow pictured transition into the water. In the second example, the same picture is flipped horizontally and laid on top of itself (inverted as well). We 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 tutorials on this page Layer Masks 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

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