Quick Mask Hat Trick
Steve Weinrebe
It's great to have the luxury to be slow and ponderous with Photoshop, but sometimes we don't have the time, or don't want to chew up a client's time.For speed, Quick Mask lives up to its name time and again, and here's a way to work with the tool, as both time saver and elegant solution to a problem.
This is my fast technique for using Quick Mask to create soft edged masks on the fly. It includes the one-two-three hat trick of Quick Mask, the Magic Wand, and the Gradient tool.
Select the area that needs a soft, gradated glow
The hot air balloon at the forefront of this image needs to have more glow, to look more translucent as if lit from the sunrise behind.
Step 1:
Select the area that we want to work on. Here I'll use the Quick Selection tool to create a selection mask of the balloon.
I can use Refine Edge here, or refine the selection by adding to (hold down the Shift key while making the selection), and subtracting from (hold down the Option/Alt key while making the selection, the selection border with other selection tools, but I'm honestly not too concerned with the edges of the selection, even the area where the tree overlaps. You'll see why in a moment.
Make a selection within the mask
Step 2:
Click the Quick Mask button in Tools, or press the Q key on your keyboard, to enter Quick Mask mode. The selected area remains full color, or "clear", while the area outside the selection, the masked area, becomes semi-opaque red.
Then, choose the Magic Wand tool, which resides with the Quick Selection tool, and click in the unmasked, "clear", area of the image. This will make a new selection of the unmasked, previously selected area (remember, you are still in Quick Mask mode).
Feather the selection with a gradient
Step 3:
Choose the Gradient tool, with Radial selected in the Options bar as the gradient shape, and the first default gradient, "Foreground to Background", as the gradient style, and make certain that White is the foreground color, and Black is the background color. Then click the Gradient tool in the center of the balloon and drag to the perimeter of the balloon's edge, and a little beyond.
The result will be a gradient of "clear" at the center radiating outward to red (because in Quick Mask, painting with the color black appears as the color red).
Step 4:
I do one step here to avoid any banding in the next step, the tonal correction; I add noise, in the amount of 2%, to add some dithering to the gradient.
Use the Quick Mask for a feathered tonal correction
Step 5:
Now I can exit Quick Mask, and apply a Curves adjustment layer to the resulting selection. Because of the gradient created in Quick Mask, the resulting selection ranges from 100% selected at the center, to no selection at the edge of the balloon (or nearly 0% selection because I drew the gradient a little beyond the edges of the balloon).
Let's do that once more, with a linear gradient
Here is another example because this technique is so useful, and seeing it done with a linear gradient may be helpful. This interior scene was lit by the skylight, but the late afternoon light illuminated the right wall much more than the left. I want to make the left wall similar in tone and gradation to the right, without affecting the skylights.
Step 1:
Make a selection of the left half of the image, then de-select the skylights. First I use the Rectangular Marquee tool to drag a rectangular selection over the left half of the image. Then I use the Quick Selection tool, in "subtract from selection" mode (by holding down the Option/Alt key), to de-select the skylights.
Step 2:
Switch to Quick Selection mode, by clicking the Quick Selection icon in Tools, or by pressing the Q key on the keyboard.
Step 3:
Make the Magic Wand the active tool and click in the clear area of the Quick Mask. This makes a selection of the clear, unmasked, portion.
Step 4:
Drag a linear gradient, with white at the left and black at the right, across from the left of the image to the center. (TIP: Hold down the Shift key to constrain the gradient to a perfect horizontal or vertical). The gradient will appear, from beginning to end, only in the selected area. Again this is a white to black gradient, but linear this time, as opposed to radial.
Step 5:
After adding 2% noise to the gradient as we did above, switch out of Quick Mask mode by clicking the Quick Mask icon again in Tools, or pressing the Q key again. Now add a Curves adjustment layer, which will affect the wall 100% at the left, gradating to 0% of the curve effect at the right.Note that the selection border (the "marching ants") in the image below cannot show the soft side of the selection; but it is there.
As in the first example, a mask is saved when the Curves adjustment layer is created. If you want to retrieve the selection to, say, apply a color adjustment to the left of the image as well, simply Command-click (Mac), or Control-click (Windows), on the adjustment layer's mask icon to bring up the selection again.
This technique, making gradient selections within Quick Mask can be used to apply shadow tones as well. After running through the steps a few times on your own images it will be second nature, and hopefully save some time in your workflow too.
Steve Weinrebe:
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Photography © Steve Weinrebe, Getty Images
