Masking technique sugestions???

[tonygamble]

"Texture selection in Picture Window Pro is a powerful masking tool that lets you target and edit parts of an image based on the amount of visual detail or variation, expanding your ability to make precise and creative adjustments"

That quote comes from Perplexity AI.

It may be rubbish but, if not, is this a way of creating a mask of, say, a person in front of some scenery?

[jsachs]

Probably not -- it lets you mask based on how rough the texture of the image is, so smooth areas are not masked and rough areas and edges are. You can adjust thresholds to set how much and what fineness of texture it bases the mask on.

This might be useful if you wanted to sharpen areas with a lot of detail and while leaving smooth areas alone.

[tonygamble]

Could I use it to fine tune a roughly created mask - in the way I would use the brush and similar pixels.

To mask a person I would create a larger mask around the subject and then use a brush to remove the excess. Might looking for textures work or can't i limit the area being looked at?

[tonygamble]

"Another technique for making the Paint tool more intelligent is to select Pixels in Color Range as the Apply To option. Now when you apply the brush, only pixels that fall within the current color range will be affected. You can flip back and forth between the color range and brush tools to change the color range as you work with the brush."

Can you explain what I do after I have made my color range selection and, when I click on the Brush icon, it says Finalise Pending Mask Operation?

I am not able to find how to retain that color range and use it to constrain my Brush.

[jsachs]

The Paint tool uses the last color range you set created. One way to create a color range without creating a mask (assuming you are starting with no mask) is to set the mode to Subtract when you create the range and just before you finalize it. Then, reset the mode back to Add and use the Paint tool to paint just the colors selected in the range.

I think this feature worked better in PWP 7 and when I rewrote it for PWP 8 I did not really think through all the consequences of using it. I don't think this feature works correctly in all cases so I would avoid it until I have a chance to fix it.

[tonygamble]

Thanks J.

I would have used it this morning to create a mask of some leafy trees against a pure cloudless sky - so i could combine one of my stock cloud images.

Flood fill almost worked but not within the trees where the sky showed through. A Paint brush that only respected that blue would have been ideal.

I'll walt until you have the time to give it an update but your suggestion is certainly worth a try.

[jsachs]

Here is another way to accomplish the same thing.

First paint a crude mask covering all the area you want to mask, including the interspersed areas you want to exclude.

Next bring up the Color Range mask tool and create a range for the area and, before finalizing it, set the mode to Overlap. This will remove the parts of the painted mask whose color fall outside the color range since in Overlap mode the mask is only light where the old mask and new mask are both light.

I will warn you in advance that accurate sky replacement is a very difficult problem and whatever tools you use you are likely to get halos around the edges of the replaced sky. There are solutions to this problem but they are complicated and don't work 100% of the time. This is a problem I come back to from time to time to work on. There are sky selection and replacement commands in Lightroom and Photoshop but in my experience they do not work reliably and often make a total mess of the job.

[tonygamble]

Thanks.

That gave me a better result than my earlier try.

Needed a +2 feather to remove most of the halos.

[tonygamble]

Tried it again this morning and it is brilliant with skies.

Is there a way the two stages could be used to mask round a figure or a face?

Maybe better than my Paint with matching pixel routine I use most of the time?