Doug Kerr
Well-known member
Yesterday (2011.05.08) was my 75th birthday. In its honor, a current series of new and substantially updated technical articles is being branded the "75th birthday series".
The first two articles released under this marque do not directly concern photography. But the third does.
In image processing, a mask is a map that tells us, for each pixel of the image, to what degree (if any) it is susceptible to various "happenings", such as (in the case of the image editing application Adobe Photoshop) deletion, Cut/Copying, adjustment, and even inclusion in an overall image buildup by layer.
In contemporary versions of Photoshop, there are three principal types of mask. Of course, one of them isn't called a mask - that is, until we decide to work on it using an advanced "workbench". (Sounds confusing already!)
While the basic concept is straightforward, the devil is in the details - and there are plenty of those, many devilish indeed.
My new technical article, "The Secret Life of Masks in Photoshop", is not a treatise on the effective use of masks in Photoshop, a topic best left to those with more experience and insight than I. Rather, in it I describe in considerable technical detail just how these masks function - how we can construct and manipulate them, and what they do. The article is available here:
http://dougkerr.net/Pumpkin/articles/Photoshop_Masks.pdf
Best regards,
Doug
The first two articles released under this marque do not directly concern photography. But the third does.
In image processing, a mask is a map that tells us, for each pixel of the image, to what degree (if any) it is susceptible to various "happenings", such as (in the case of the image editing application Adobe Photoshop) deletion, Cut/Copying, adjustment, and even inclusion in an overall image buildup by layer.
In contemporary versions of Photoshop, there are three principal types of mask. Of course, one of them isn't called a mask - that is, until we decide to work on it using an advanced "workbench". (Sounds confusing already!)
While the basic concept is straightforward, the devil is in the details - and there are plenty of those, many devilish indeed.
My new technical article, "The Secret Life of Masks in Photoshop", is not a treatise on the effective use of masks in Photoshop, a topic best left to those with more experience and insight than I. Rather, in it I describe in considerable technical detail just how these masks function - how we can construct and manipulate them, and what they do. The article is available here:
http://dougkerr.net/Pumpkin/articles/Photoshop_Masks.pdf
Best regards,
Doug
