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Lesson Info

Quick Mask Mode

so I want to show you another way of thinking about your selection in. That is something called quick mask mode. If you look in your tools panel just below your foreground and background colors, which are these two icons is this, and that is quick mask mode. If you hover over it, it should eventually tell you that that it means quick mask. And it should also tell you a keyboard shortcut, which is just typing a letter. Q. Don't type command Q or Control. Q. Because that quits Photoshopped, this is Q. All by itself, you use quick mask mode primarily when you have a selection on your screen and you want to view it differently. It's called Quick Mask. Do you remember when I I kind of mentioned masks? I said, It's a different way of looking at a selection where, instead of seeing it looking like marching ants, you see it looking like usually a black and white picture where white indicates what selected Black indicates what's not, and that's gonna do it for us. But instead of showing is blac...

k and white, it's gonna show it as an overlay. Let me show you. I'm gonna type the letter Q. And watch what happens to this selection. You no longer see the marching ants on the edge and the area that's not selected get covered with red. That made a temporary a mask. A mask just means viewing a selection in a different way. When I showed you the concept of a mask at the beginning of this session, I think I went to the channels panel to show it to you. Well, let's go look there. You don't have to know that this is happening there. But just so you know, if I go to the channels panel Oh, usually it shows it. They changed. It usually would show a channel down there called quick mask mode. Surprise. It doesn't. No, it doesn't. Well, it used to show it here in the channels panel where you could actually see that it is a behind the scenes. It's using something called channels. You know, what's happening is my interface isn't updating. Let me see if I can get it to their e. I just had to resize it. I'm having a screen redraw issue. Um, so anyway, in channels there, this go quick mask, It does the exact same thing I did earlier to get it to show up here. Which means that it went to the select menu it chose save selection and it gave it the name quick mask and it put it there, and it just overlaying this on the main image. But you don't have to know that it's just nice for some of you to know that it relates All right, so quick mask mode. It's a way of viewing a selection where you see it as a red overlay. But what's nice about it is you can use any tool that would work on a grayscale picture any tool that will work on a black and white image that means painting tools, filters, adjustments, anything you can paste a picture in whatever. So let's see how we can use this if I use my paint brush tool. And right now I'm painting with black because my foreground color is black. Over here in this part of my screen, I'm gonna paint just some stripes in here. Diagonal little lines actually get out larger brush. OK, now I'm gonna turn off quick mask mode by typing the letter Q or clicking the quick mask icon that has found near the bottom of my tools pounds when I type of letter. Q. I just modified that selection because when you're in quick mask mode, any area that is covered with red is not selected. And so if I typed letter Q to go back to quick mask mode by painting like I did, uh, I'm in effect changing that selection. And so I'm gonna choose undo a few times because I didn't need to do this. And if you need multiple undoes, you go to the window menu and there's a choice within it called History. It a list. Everything you've done to your picture having a weird screen re dry. She, though there and I can just click on the step that is above the word brush tool. That means go back so as if I never painted. All right, let's zoom up here. And so I could look closely at this edge and see isn't inaccurate anywhere. And if it is inaccurate, I could paint maybe a little bit right there, And if I want to get rid of the red stuff, then I need a paint with white so I'm gonna go down here and I see this is black. If I want to switch these two, this little double arrow would do it for me. And now I'm painting with white, and I might just fine tune that little speck wherever it was inaccurate. I just typed command zero to zoom out to see no controls their own windows. When you're done using quick mass mo just type letter Q. Again, you're back to your selection, So it could be a very nice way of previewing a selection and then modifying it by using a paintbrush.

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