Add Photoshop Masks and Adjustments to RAW Images Contributor: Seán Duggan n Specialty: Fine Art Primary Tool Used: Photoshop Masks The adjustments you make in Camera Raw are global in nature, meaning that they affect the entire image. The primary goal when processing RAW files is to do as much work as possible in Camera Raw because you have so much control for global adjustments and the changes are losslessly applied. But for some images, you have to make local adjustments that affect only a portion of the image. For those, you have to use adjustment layers and layer masks in Photoshop. This technique shows you how to use a RAW image processed in Camera Raw (in this example, an image taken on a rainy day at the Lake of Constance in southern Germany) and then shows you how to add a few adjustment layers with layer masks in Photoshop to take the interpretation further. 6.67 1 Open the image you want to process in Camera Raw. Press Control/Ô+U to turn off Auto Adjustments. Make adjustments to create a good rendition of the image. The white balance was good, so the primary changes to this image were to lighten it by adjusting the Exposure and Brightness sliders and increasing the Saturation. Once you finish you initial adjustments, click Open. 236
The image opens in Photoshop. The process and methods you use to make adjustments and to create masks for your images will be governed by the images themselves and what you want to do with them. The methods shown in this technique are simply the ones that I chose to use with this image. You can use this technique to jumpstart ideas for processing your images. Note At this point, you can save the image as a master file using either the PSD or TIFF file formats. 6.68 2 For this photograph, I wanted to darken the sky to give the sense of dark clouds and rain falling on the lake. It actually was raining as I took this photo, but I wanted to emphasize the stormy aspect of the day a bit more. To darken the sky, however, I need to create a mask so that the foreground elements of the dock do not get darkened as well. Many images already have the beginnings of a mask hiding in the image; the trick is to find and modify them to suit your needs. 6.69 237
To find the hidden mask, select the Channels palette and search individual color channels to see whether anything is there that you can use. After clicking each color channel, I determined that the Blue channel had the most contrast between the sky and the dock. After you determine what channel to use for the mask, copy this channel by dragging it to the New Channel icon at the bottom of the Channels palette to create a mask channel. 3 A mask is made up of grayscale tones. When applied as a layer mask, white areas show adjustments to the layer and black areas do not show it. Gray areas will show adjustments partially. In this image, the copy of the Blue channel provided a good starting point for a mask; all that s required is to modify it. To make modifications to the mask, choose Image Adjustments Levels, or press Ctrl/Ô+L to open the Levels dialog box. For this image, moving the sliders closer together creates a more pronounced contrast separation between the posts on the dock and the sky. Click OK in the Levels dialog box once you get the desired adjustment. With your mask channel active in the Channels palette (in this case the Blue Copy channel), click the Eye icon at the top for the RGB composite-channel view. This view allows you to see the regular image and the mask channel at the same time. The black areas of the mask channel appear as a semi-transparent red overlay. 6.70 Tip When you use the Levels or Curves command to apply drastic contrast modifications to a mask, make sure that the mask channel is the active element and not the main image. The severity of these adjustments can wreak major havoc with the colors in an image! 238
4 Now, check the image for any areas where the mask needs to be adjusted. In this image, the only area where I need to manually alter the mask altered is the top part of the lamp post. For this image, I used the Pen tool to create a path of the top section of the lamp. 6.71 5 Click the Paths palette. Then load the path as a selection by Ctrl/Ô+clicking on it. You then want to make sure that the mask channel is active, verify that black is the background color, and press Delete to fill the selection. Choose Select Deselect and click RGB in the Channels palette to make the main image active and visible. Click the Eye icon for the mask to turn off the red overlay. With a rough mask of the dock created, the next step for this example is to create an adjustment layer and layer mask to darken the clouds. 6.72 239
6 Depending on the image you re working on, you might want to make tonal adjustments to darken or lighten parts of the image. In this case, I added a Curves adjustment layer. For this image, I clicked in the clouds near the top of the image to see where these tonal values are located on the curve. You can Ctrl/Ô-click the image to place a control point on the curve for the tones you want to adjust. For this image, I pulled the point to significantly darken the entire image. Click OK in the Curves dialog box when you finish with your adjustments. 6.73 7 If you want to create a gradual transition, you can use a Gradient. In this case, I selected the Gradient tool from the Tools palette and chose a gradient from the Gradient Picker on the Options bar. For this image, I selected the Black-to-White gradient. The gradient style is Linear, the Mode is Normal, and the Opacity is 100 percent. 240 6.74
8 For this image, I positioned the cursor just above the tops of the posts. Then holding the Shift key, I dragged a line straight up to just about the level of the top of the lamp. Using the Shift key constrains the line to a vertical when dragging up. The gradient is black where you start the line hiding what this layer does and the gradient is white where you release the mouse button showing what this layer does. Everything in between is the gradient from black to white, which creates a gradual transition between the darkened clouds and the dock where no darkening is applied. 6.75 9 To integrate the mask of the dock, or the mask channel from earlier steps, into the gradient mask for the clouds, I chose the Blue Copy mask in the Channels palette to make it active. Then I inverted it by choosing Image Adjustments Invert. I inverted the mask because I needed to add black to the gradient mask where the lamp pole intersects with areas that are being darkened. To do this, I inverted the mask so that those areas became white and are selected when the mask is loaded as a selection. 241
6.76 10 Next, load the selection of your inverted (in this case, Blue Copy) mask by Ctrl/Ô+clicking its thumbnail. Click the layer mask for the Curves adjustment layer. With black set as the background color, press the Delete key to fill the selection with black. In this example, this prevents the lamp from being darkened by the clouds adjustment. Choose Select Deselect to remove the selection. 6.77 242
11 Examine the image closely to see whether the edges of your selection need to be softened. Upon closer inspection of this image, I noticed the precise edges of the Pen tool looked too hard and cut out. To fix a problem like this one, use the Lasso tool to select this area. Choose Filter Blur Gaussian Blur. In this case, I applied a 1.0 pixel blur. 6.78 12 At this point, you may like the results of your image. But, if it still needs some enhancing, you can continue to make adjustments. For example, with this image, final adjustments included: l l l Selecting and masking the lake area and adding a curve layer where I deepened the cyan/green lake color by pulling down the curve a bit on the Red channel. Adding a new Curves adjustment layer where I pulled down slightly on the RGB curve, and then added a bit more cyan by pulling down a bit on the red curve. Then I blurred the edges of the mask with a 1-pixel Gaussian Blur. On the Clouds adjustment layer, I used a large, soft-edged brush set to 10 percent opacity to brush in the appearance of falling rain over the lake. 243