My Photoshop Masking Technique

First, I don’t mask everything the same way. In fact, the example I’m about to show you would probably be done differently given the neutrality of the background. But, I want to get really really basic here for a second. Why do we Mask? Simple. Because you never know. Masking is non-destructive and allows for an incredible amount of flexibility when extracting something. Your other option is to delete or erase what you don’t want, but I would highly recommend not doing that. Our computers are powerful enough that we can carry the extra overhead of having a few quick masks among our layers.

Call me old school, but I like to mask by hand. There are occasionally situations where I jump into channels and extract by using the most “contrasty” channel and so forth. But, unless the background of your subject is extremely lacking in texture you probably aren’t going to get decent results. In the end this is just the way I do it. It’s not right or wrong, it’s just the way I prefer.

Step 1 – Buy a Wacom tablet

Well, jeez I must work or get paid by Wacom to say that, right? Nope. They’re just that good. When I said I mask by hand I meant it. I’m literally drawing on the screen with the stylus. For those of you who don’t know what a tablet is, this is mine:

Yes, that is my finger

With all that being said, you can still mask effectively without having a tablet. I know they’re expensive, and that sucks, but if you do this for a living it will be one of the best purchase you’ll make. The pressure sensitivity alone makes it a crazy nice asset in your tool belt.

Step 2 – Locate your subject

It really doesn’t matter what the heck you choose to use. I found this lady on the internet. Not sure who she is, but I heard she has like 14 children from Africa or something like that. (Yes, that was sarcastic)

Angelina

 Okay, so now we have something that we can stare at for a little while. Let’s move on.

Step 3 – Starting to mask

The first step you should always do is duplicate the layer you are going to be working on. So once your in Photoshop and have opened your image go ahead and drag that layer down on top of the Create a New Layer icon. It’s at the bottom of the layers palette. This will duplicate the layer for you. After you have duplicated the layer, apply a layer mask to your layer. Your layers palette should now look like this:

Current State of Layers Palette

Now for some tricks of mine. First select the mask itself in the layers palette. Then hit backslash “\”. This will toggle on the highlighting aspect of the layer mask. In other words everything you mask from now on will show up as a red glow. Just tap backslash again and you’ll just see what you’ve masked. You also want to get familiar with the following keyboard shortcuts when you have the brush selected as your tool:

• “[" - makes the brush smaller
• "]” – makes the brush larger
• “shift+[" - makes the brush softer (essentially feathers the edges)
• "shift+]” – makes the brush harder (will go until you have no feather)

Step 4 – Outlining

Here we go. This is where my technique begins. Using my wacom tablet and a medium sized brush I’m going to fully outline Angelina. I’ll have to make the brush smaller in certain places, but that is fine. The brush should have a bit of a feather to it so we don’t get ultra crisp, and unrealistic, edges. Also, make sure your opacity and flow are both at 100%. Here is a close up of the outlining I’m talking about:

We just need an outline around the subject

Hopefully you’re not saying, “oohhhhhh, this sucks so bad to have to do by hand.” Well, it kind of does, but when you’re a hot shot designer some day you’ll be passing that off to a production artist. For right now, you have to start somewhere. Continue outlining the subject until she is completely surrounded by red.

Here is the fully outlined image. And don’t bust my chops for not fully masking her hair. This is just a tutorial, and the image is pretty low res so I didn’t want to bother.

Fully Outlined

Cool. So we’re actually getting pretty close to being done. Now for the extration.

Step 5 – Final Extraction

The hard part is over at this point. Next, you need to turn off the visual masking by hitting backspace “\” on your keyboard. Now, hold down alt and click on your mask. If you do this successfully you should see just your mask in black and white.

The result of alt-clicking the layer mask

Sweet. Since we are wanting to extract the foreground we will need to color everything outside the outline Angelina black. Now, what tool do you know what is really good at selecting things of contrasting colors? Yup the good ‘ol magic wand! Start by selecting anywhere outside the outlined Angelina. Then what I like to do is apply a 2px, or so, feather to the selection. Go to Select > Modify > Feather to do that. Now you just have to fill in, with the paint bucket, the selected area with solid black, #000000. Go ahead and fill the area 5 or 6 times to ensure it completely fills out the feather. Here is the desired result:

Result of Mask

Last but not least, you just need to go back and alt-click the layer mask to reveal your newly extracted Angelina. Not too shabby. The best part about all of this is its’ just a mask. You can continue to do all the fine tuning you want. Brushing on the color white will reveal the actual image. Brushing on the color black makes it disappear. Make sense?

It’s definitely not rocket science, but I’ve found it to be the least amount of steps needed to get a good extraction. And it’s entirely up to you on how detailed you want your mask to get. If you feel like it you can get in there and and mask out all those beautiful strands of hair. Have fun masking and let me know if there are any questions.

Final result