Deke’s Techniques 011: Masking Highlights and Shadows

1. crisderaud17 March 2011, 3:37 GMT +01:00

This week’s free technique gives you one of Deke McClelland’s many Photoshop tips for “using an image to select itself,” specifically isolating the highlights and shadows of a photograph to select the light and dark areas painlessly using the underrated Color Range command. By using the image’s own details to create the mask, you don’t have to rely on the unreliable quick selection or magic wand tool. And you can fine-tune your mask to add areas to it. Another hidden benefit of using Color Range is that you can either generate a selection (working blind, as Deke likes to call it) or you can directly create a layer mask, and thus see what you’re doing as you do it. (Content Manager’s note: I love Color Range, and will use this movie to perpetuate my own evangelism of this elegant, automated feature.)

http://www.deke.com/content/deke’s-techniques-011-masking-highlights-and-shadows