Today, because I’m trying to look busy so I won’t have to go feed any more cattle, I’d like to show you how I edited this photo I posted on Confessions the other day.
Here’s the SOOC (Straight-out-of-Camera) original. While the subjects, Pinkie and Big Guy, are cute as all get-out, I thought the photo itself was pretty underwhelming. At first, I considered really bumping up the color and making all the blues of the denim really pop.
But then I had a different idea. I thought it would be groovy to desaturate the image, then highlight the kids’ scarves—or “wild rags”, as they’re curiously known around here.
This action has a Layer Mask automatically built in. Layer Masks appear as a white square, right next to the layer name. In a very small nutshell: since the layer mask is WHITE, anywhere on the photo we paint with BLACK will, in essence, “erase” that part of the layer and let the layer underneath show through.
What we need to do now is change the foreground color to black so the brush will be painting with black. By default, the foreground color is white. But if we painted white over the photo, it wouldn’t affect the layer mask at all since the layer mask is…ready?…white.
I know. It didn’t make sense to me for months and months.
Now, adjust the brush to the size you’d like (click “[" to make the brush smaller; click "]” to make the brush larger) and begin brushing the areas where you want the bottom layer (in this case, the colorful scarf) to show through.
This is the most beautiful thing about Layer Masks: the ability to go back and forth and “erase”…then “unerase” areas of the photo. If you had used the Eraser tool to execute this step—say you ran the sepia action without a Layer Mask then used the Eraser tool to literally erase the parts of the sepia layer where you wanted the underneath color layer to show through, you wouldn’t be able to “redo” any of that layer. So if you colored outside the lines on your first pass…you’d be up a creek without a paddle.
With layer masks, you don’t have that problem—you can undo and redo (erase and unerase) as much as you need to.
And that’s it! I just continued this step until both scarves were bright and colorful again, and the edges were relatively clean. Then I flattened the image and ran the “Boost” action (from PW Action Set 1) to add sharpness and contrast to the overall image.
Is your head spinning? This is one of the most simple ways to add “selective color” to an image, so if I made it sound complicated I should be stoned in the public square.
Though I have to say, finally getting a grasp on Layer Masks was one of the most challenging accomplishments in my life.
Give it a try! Then post your experiments here to show us how it worked for you.