manishkumara

Now on to using masks.

Masks are a way of cutting a area of an image without destroying it. Masking a layer is an incredibly flexible way of handling a section of an image. To show you this in action we're going to work with a dandelion. The point of this demo is to show how you can make very fine selections

Wikipedia is providing the dandelion. First, look at the channels tab. We're looking for the one with the most contrast between what we want to get rid of and what we want to keep.

The blue channel is the best for this little demo. The channel you'll choose will vary image by image. Next, increase the contrast as gently as you can. You want the stuff you're going to keep to be white and the stuff you're getting rid of black. Whether you work in black first and then invert the image is up to you. Sometimes that works out best.

In progress.

This is what you want to end up with.

Next, go to Select>Load Selection> whatever you named that channel as, then hit the Add Vector Mask button.

This is the result. The Dandelion is separated with all the little detail preserved.

Because this is a Sports Logo board, here's the Dandelion on a football field.

I did have to do a little adjusting. The exterior edges still kept some of the greens, so I made a duplicate layer. The first layer is cut in a little. Loading the selection again, I feathered the edge, then deleted the selection. This cut in the edge. The layer below was set to Screen. That gave the image that very light edge that Dandelions have.

So how does this apply to football?

We'll take another look at our football player.

I cleaned up the image a little bit, removing the players in the back and cropping it down to where it's focused on the player. The original is washed out so I increased the contrast. First thing up is the grass. I wanted to work on the light and dark parts of the grass separately. The black and white is a division between colors that were lighter or darker and they probably weren't the same colors.

I used the method above to made a mask for the darker colors and below it I did the greens and such. Without the original image it looked like this.

(note that there's a layer for the white lines as well)

Put together it looks like this.

You'll also note that the layers for the grass are in their own folder, which has a layer mask of it's own to keep the grass off the player, which has to be a first.

Really Very nice ....