Masking with the Selection Brush: Tutorial

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Tutorials

Masking with the Selection Brush

If you've worked with Adobe® Photoshop® Elements 2.0 for a while, you are probably familiar with the selection tools: the marquee tools, the magic wand, the lasso, polygon lasso, and the magnetic lasso. The new selection brush makes selecting parts of an image simpler and allows you to tweak selections by painting on your image. With the selection brush, you have two ways to view and work with a selection, the traditional "marching ants view" and the mask view. While they look different, both views allow you to select a portion of an image that you want to copy, apply a filter to, and lighten or darken.

1. Select part of an image.
Click the selection brush in the toolbar. Make sure that Mode in the options bar is set to Selection. Now you can use any brush tip and any size brush to paint over your image to select a portion of it. Each stroke adds to the selection. You can even select non-contiguous sections of your image. If you accidentally select something you don't want selected, press the Alt key (Windows) or the Option key (Mac OS) and paint over the selected area to remove that part of the selection.

2. Tweak the selection in mask mode.
In the options bar, choose Mask from the Mode menu. You'll notice that the non-selected areas will be overlaid with a transparent red color. The areas that you selected will show through this overlay. These are the areas that you want to copy or change in some way. When you are in mask mode, think of the overlay as masking tape that you are placing on your image to protect it--like you do when painting a house. Painting with the selection brush in mask mode, adds to the protected area of the image (and removes areas from the selection). This is the opposite of working in selection mode. To remove portions of the mask, press the Alt key (Windows) or the Option key (Mac OS) and paint over part of the mask to remove.

3. Fine tune the mask.
One big advantage of working in mask mode is that you can paint with a soft brush to partially select portions of an image. This is the same as feathering a selection in selection mode, but you can more easily see the partially selected areas in mask mode. In the options bar, choose a soft edged brush, and then set the Overlay opacity to about 85%. Now paint over portions of the mask (either adding or deleting). The edges of the mask that are more transparent are partially selected areas. When you transform or copy the selected area, those areas will be partially transformed, or if you copy them, they'll be partially transparent. This avoids hard or abrupt edges on your selections.

4. Copy and paste the selected image to another photo.
Choose Edit > Copy from the menu. Open the photo you want to paste into and choose Edit > Paste. The selected image is pasted into a new layer in your photo. Now click the move tool in the toolbar and drag the new layer to the location to want in the photo. Or, if you need to rotate or resize as you move the new layer, choose Image > Transform > Free transform.