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Perfect Mask Plug-in

Lesson 25 from: Retouching & Adobe Photoshop Techniques

Lindsay Adler

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Lesson Info

25. Perfect Mask Plug-in

Lesson Info

Perfect Mask Plug-in

What do you do if you have to make a complicated mask of that hair if I zoom in here this is what it looked like more less rod a camera I brought down the blacks a little bit but this is what the picture looked like let's say I want to make her skin completely white and pale how do I make a mask of that hair and that's going to be really, really challenging and so you could do it by hand kind of there a couple ways to do it but this is when I would use a plug in and I wanted to make sure I covered that just because this is actually how I do it I actually use these tools I'm going to open and I would go in and make sure I re touched her skin and I would kind of overdo it because this is oben guard retouch so I'd smooth outer skin here so a little less letters can hear kind of flattened out features a little bit and give her a brighter highlight on her nose. I would also go ahead and run portraiture so let's go to filter image gnomic portraiture and in this case I know for sure that I do...

n't want to use uh frequency separation or anything because I don't want her to have skin detail is the technique where her skin goes completely smooth suffice zoom in a little bit more I'm basically eliminating detail and that's fine with me what I'll do is seo was a little bit blurry all I need to do is mask back in some of the edges and the skin will say perfectly smooth but then it won't look like a blurry photo books of mass packed in this edges so when head okay even an option and the mass tool and then I'll just paint the effect on her skin cut all right, what? We have covered all of these things what I really want to get to is masking out the hair look armpits I'd get rid of that bothers me okay? So when emerges down to get out of the way because the technique that I'm going to use it needs uh merged larry needs a flat lor so I'm going to go to file automate and I want perfect mask and I need perfect mass five point to um this even okay this is I don't understand I do understand but it's suite seven but it's perfect mass five point two is like the fifth point to it aeration of it but it's in suite seven I don't know okay someone open this up and show you uh for the the demo of michael it was really really easy to select that background but something like this is going to be a little more complicated I have to do with hairs so what I'll define over here where it says colors I can click around and say, ok, I do want to keep reds, for example, or in this example, cause I want to make her skin white. I actually want to drop the reds if that makes sense, because I'm goingto make everything out smooth and white except read so over here on the left, the top tool is the keep brush. The bottom tool is the drop brush, so I'm going to zoom in and I'm going to tell this plug in, I want to drop red hair. I don't want this to be in the mask, so I'm just going to click here, it's going to think for a second and it's going. Okay, well, what else is similar to this? And I'm going to switch over here in the bottom left so that you can see the mass that it creates its thinking. Hopefully not freezing. Okay, let's, switch to a mask. Okay, so it's, showing me so far what is defined so far, so good. But if you come over here to colors, you have keep and drop so I can say I want to drop all of the reds I want to keep all of those light colored skin tones, so when I add and I'm going to do it it says you want to keep colors and drop college I want to do both because I'm gonna show you both so I'll say both and now if I go to the drop area let's do I want to drop reds and see what it's selecting it's giving me all these different tones so it's helping the program know what you intend to keep or drop someone a click around and you can do a time but what's more important to me is this area down here kind of the area where it's going to be more confused near the edges of the hair? So these kind of in between tones is where I'm clicking then if I switch over to the keep I want to tell it I want it so I want to switch over to my keep and I'm gonna say I want to keep these color skin tones underneath there chin nose and then you can click around forever if you click to many places than sometimes it gets confused and it's likely that those two colors or too close and you might have to go delete some um but let me just continue this quickly I'm going to go back to my drop and it was a okay so I want to drop here it's going to think this one is very, very intensive for processor but it makes it a lot easier so I can keep clicking around and it knows but let's just take a look more importantly, two areas down here, this is what we really are worried about these areas, okay, so when I select down here near the hair, you see, and it starts to extend all right, and then down here is where it gets confused, so all right, so we're getting close to the edge. This is where you can say, okay, I know that I want to keep skin so you can let it know that, but you have something right here, it's, the third tool down and called the refined brush tool, and this is what you're supposed to use to outline edges, and so you're telling it, okay, this is where there's an area where some of it I want to keep some of that I want to drop, and based on the information you gave it for the keeping drop, it helps decide how to make the mask. So I'm going to come in here and just trace kind of these edges a bit more, and I won't trace the hair and to see how it selected the hair correctly so I can just roughly selected and it's getting all of this hair follicles and actually selecting them, so it is somewhat time consuming. But it's better than I mean you have what other options do you have? There are other options but this is going to be one of the fastest and so I'm just going to trace those areas and I want to do this roughly so I don't take forever on it but you can trace outline areas of hair and then you know for in here you can go back and say okay I want to drop these areas and so it's just tweaking back and forth all right let me grab a couple more areas and then move on so I said I want all that add it to my mask but then if I add my refine I can outline the hairs and it's going to extend onto those hairs okay so I would have to do this a little bit more same thing it works it works pretty well done here outline and say this is an area that's an edge and see how it picks up those really fine hairs and you keep adding all right so I'm gonna hit okay and I would hit okay for the uh lips as well so I probably if I were doing that carefully it would probably take me ten minutes to make this election and it's not instant but it is a harris election so if you look you can kind of see the mask here where it masked it out I would have a much more refined selection and what I can do is I can load this election okay? And I can go into my hugh saturation I can go to my yellows and reds and pull out my house and rents to pull out some friends to see how it's making the skin lighter I can go back load the same selection goto levels and lighting up the skin and if I had, you know my mask perfectly refined now I have completely pure smooth white skin, so to see the before and after when you have a very refined mascot actually get the hair in there and this is the basic example of how I do the perfectly smooth skin you run portraiture you make a mass to mask out things that you don't want to be affected, you pull out reds and yellows, load that same mask and increase the contrast can you tell us again? Oh, we'll go, but what plug in that you're using? Yeah, this one is on one perfect mask and the on one plug ins that I use on one has a whole suite and you can go ahead look at their web site, see what they have to even have a retouching program if there's anyone out there that loves light room hates photoshopped, they actually have a plug in so that you can do levels and layers they actually do different layers within flight room so that could be cool it is cheaper option as well it's less expensive and photo shop but the two most the tools that I use most commonly from on one our perfect resize which is thie upsizing and then a perfect mask most commonly used once very cool and lindsay way have a lot of people who are saying but how would you do this without the plug in? How would you do this without the plug in? And I just wantto clarify that that's your teaching right now is how to use these again, right? Like you stated, you could do all these things without and what I would do without a plug in in this example is I would go ahead and do several versions of selective color really, really, really carefully uh me personally because it's easy for me. Easier for me, there's the time up for doing selections with channels before where you load a channel you burn and dodge it lets you get refined edges, but this isn't the edge of something this's hair eso what I would end up doing is if you go up to select color range, I can zoom in and I can select her hair and see that selection that it gives me, um let's see, can I assume and more than that usher so if I click around and clicking on where her hair is anywhere that I click is added to that selection and I could do that a few times so let's say I do one selection and every time you could save you save that selection and then the next little selection do you can add to it so I could do one where maybe I do consulting general for the hair the next one I zoom in and I do really careful color range selection for the tips of the hair and then I just kind of blend it I'm using lair mass so there are ways around it but this would be more time intensive because I would have to ok did it reach too far was my fuzziness wright was a crisp enough edge in the beginning I did it by hand I definitely did I don't even know if perfect mass exist existed then so if you watch time just tell those people if you watch the other two days in my class is the first day we're besides portraiture there's been really any plug in that I said you need I'm just kind of show you what I do to make my job easier but you don't need any plug ins to do any of this stuff you can pick it up pick another example of student work uh this is a photo can and I were talking about this one's this one's fine but um I used to be very bad photographer, really bad, and this is a fine photo. But we'll talk about that a little bit about that later. You let me know when you want to, but I wanted a red background, and I had a in this example, um, a tablecloth, and it was wrinkled, and I had a tiny space, and so it's unevenly lit, and this is a perfect example of how you would use perfect mask. This would be really easy to cut out something like that, so I could say, keep the reds, outline her body, and then I can replace this red background with a solid, correctly colored red background. And because she's cut out, I could also add a highlight. So it looked like I had a very nice spotlight behind her and then have a grady in. So these tools can improve the situation if you're working with a tablecloth and eight foot wide, ten foot deep room.

Class Materials

bonus material

Keyboard Shortcuts
Retouching Checklist
Beauty and Retouching
Creative Techniques

Ratings and Reviews

Sean
 

Fantastic Photoshop course. I knew Lindsay was great at Photography, Lighting, Posing and Public Speaking, but I am really blown away by her mad (great) skills at Photoshop. Lindsay really is a fantastic teacher. She turns what might be a more or less dry topic into a fun and entertaining topic. Thank you Lindsay and thank you CreativeLIve. You have a real superstar with Lindsay Adler.

a Creativelive Student
 

This is a great workshop for photographers wanting to learn and hone in on their retouching skills. As a photoshop user and photographer of 10 yrs I have been able to take away some further techniques to help better my skills and more or less tailor them. I would suggest you have some adv beginner knowledge of photoshop because I don't think some of the techniques you will be able to keep up with unless you buy it. There are two things that I wish she did better in her teaching and that is to teach new users to label all their layers and what they are as you are working. As you can see Lindsay ends up with 20 layers and unless your the one doing the editing you will have know idea what is what when you have to go back to it. So its best to teach this in the beginning so people get into the habit of organization early. Also I wish she used a Wacom. It really does cut your editing time in half and you have more solid movements in precisely selecting areas of a photo. From a photographer to other photographers. Use a wacom. You can start with a basic baboo for $89 and when the apple wireless mouse cost $69. Time is money, and a wacom truely save time! I used to use a mouse and my trackpad and once I switched I was like OMG what was I thinking before! So I wish she just emphasized that point more. Overall I think it was $99 well spent.

Christian G.
 

Not only is Lindsay very knowledgeable and a very good teacher but I REALLY TRULY appreciate her no-BS, straight-forward style.. No time wasted on long tangents talking about herself (or what have you), on cute remarks or on off-the-mark humor. She has showed us many great techniques, has presented to us various creative/different ideas AND she has also really been able to explain "how she thinks of a solution", how there is a bit of trial and error, "even" at her level.. All in a all, a truly excellent course and worth every penny!! Thank you Lindsay and thank you to the CreativeLive team for a great course!!

Student Work

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