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Creating, Saving, & Applying Masks

This tutorial is written in and for PSP8 and assumes you have a working knowledge of PSP.

YOU WILL NEED:
JASC's PSP8 (30 day free trial) - You can get it HERE
A graphic - For my graphic I am using a picture of Larry and myself when we were in Laughlin, Nevada this past May.

We've now learned where to find everything about Masks on the layer menu and on your layer palette and what you can do with the show all and hide all when creating a new mask using a graphic. As I have mentioned, JASC has created a number of wonderful masks for us to use and you can also fine many predesigned masks on the Internet, just go to Google and type in PSP Masks in the search bar and you fill find literally hundreds of sites that offer them.

In this lesson, we are going to create our own simple mask, save the mask and how to apply the mask on your graphic.

Screenshots are resized and compressed for faster loading.

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You can make your own mask any shape that you would like. I'm going to show you how to make a simple oval mask in this lesson, however you can make a square, rectangle, star or any shape that you would like.

Step 1.
Open a new image 300x400, black background. I used a resolution of 100 as that is what my last image was. Resolution doesn't really matter that much unless you are going to print your image, then it matters a lot. In the first lesson I told you that where a mask is black, it will completely cover the layer and where it is white it will leave the layer uncovered.

Step 2:
Activate your selection tool, , selection type = ellipse, mode=replace, feather = 4, antialias checked. I used a feather amount so it would give you a softer edge, you can set your feather to any amount that you like.

Set your cursor in the middle of your image, coordinates x150, y200. You will find these on your status bar in the lower right corner.

Draw out an oval.

Keep your oval selected, you will see marching ants where your oval is.

Step 3:
Set your foreground material color to white. Activate your flood fill tool, it's the paint can on your tool bar, and flood fill your selection. Go to selections/select none. (Ctrl+D) This is how your image should look. See how soft the edge is?

As I mentioned earlier, you can make your mask any shape you want. Below I show a couple of different examples.

Octagon

Rounded Rectangle

Star

Step 4:
Before we can tell PSP that this image needs to be used as a mask, we need to promote the background to a regular layer. Go to Layers/Promote Background Layer. If you do not do this, when you try doing the next step you will get a warning message stating that the background must be promoted to a regular layer.

Now we can tell PSP that this image is to be used as a mask. Go Layers/New Mask Layer/From Image.

This dialog box will now appear. Choose Source luminance and click OK.

The black portion of your image will turn transparent. Depending on how you have your color scheme set up in File/Preferences/General Preferences/Transparency, your image will look like this or whatever color you have your transparent background set for.

Step 5:
You now will want to save your mask that you created so you can use it again. Go to Layers~~>Load/Save Mask-->Save Mask to Disk. You will get this dialog box.

Give your mask a unique name, I always start mine with my initials so that I know that I am the creator, and click save. PSP will automatically save your masks with a .pspmask extension.

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Applying your mask.

Step 1:
Open the image that you want to apply your mask to. Duplicate your image (Shift+D). The main reason for making a copy is in case I want to use the image again and forget to change the name when I save *S* You can close out your original graphic.

If your image is on a background layer you will want to promote it to a regular layer. Go Layers-->Promote Background Layer.

Step 2:
Go to Layers-->Load Mask From Disk. You will get this dialog box.

Click on the down arrow next to your masks and all of the masks that you have loaded will appear. Scroll down to the mask you made. Of course, you can always use one that JASC has provided for us ~smiles~. I left the default of Source luminance checked.

In the orientation area you can choose to have it fit to canvas, fit to layer, or as is. If you choose fit to canvas you can adjust the mask by stretching or contracting as needed. If you have resized a layer, not the entire canvas, you can choose fit to layer. As is places the mask starting in the top left corner of the current layer, if your masks image is smaller than the current layer, PSP masks all pixels outside of the mask image. Keep your eye on the preview pane to see how it changes. I also have some screenshots below.

In the Options area you can choose to Invert transparency, which will turn your black area white and your white areas black. When using the As is you can choose Hide All, Show All, or Use Image Value.

Let's examine what happens when you use As is. My mask is smaller than the image that I am going to use. If I choose the Hide all mask you will see that the mask is not centered in the preview.

When using Show All mask it leaves a space on the right side and changes the surrounding black pixels to white.

This is what happened when the mask was applied. Sure doesn't look very good does it?

Leaving your options set at the default will normally be the most beneficial to you. Here is how my image looks with the mask applied with the default settings.

You can now save your image as a gif if you like or do more editing and add a background to your image. I'll show you more about doing this in the next lesson. Here is my image saved as a gif.

One more thing to note. The mask we made was 300x400. What will happen if you use an image that is wider than the height? When you load mask from disk your mask will now look like this, see the preview pane.

 

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I hope this part of the Mystery of Masks helps you understand creating, saving, and applying Masks. Coming soon we will create a Vignette using a mask and a gradient.

If you have any problems, comments or questions please do not hesitate to E-mail me.

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Tutorial written and created by Patti Wavinak for Moon's Designs. These Tutorials are copyrighted by law. You may LINK to them only. You may not remove any of the graphics, zip files or html within these pages to reproduce these Tutorials, without the expressed permission of Moon's Designs. These pages may not be removed from this website and sent via e-mail, nor saved, stored or archived in files in YahooGroups or other mailing list sites, nor may they be translated and placed on another site.
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