6.0 Combining Images

page two
Quick mask fills the non-selected area of the image with red semitransparent color that can be edited with the painting tools. Use black to add to the mask, and white to remove it.
      To set your background and foreground colors to black and white, click on the default colors icon in the toolbox. It's the two little overlapping squares in the lower left corner of the illustration below. Click the switch colors icon, which is the little double headed arrow in the upper right corner to switch your background, and foreground colors from black to white.

 I magnified the image as much as was necessary to get a really good look at every part of the flowers edge when painting on the mask. Use the zoom tool, or the Navigator palette and try a 300 or 400 % magnification.
      Make sure the paintbrush, or whichever tool you use has its Opacity set to 100 %, in its options bar. Choose a hard edged brush from the first row in the brushes pop-up palette.

When you have the mask covering every pixel of the background, go to the toolbox, and click the standard selection button, which is just to the left of the quick mask button.

Your selection should look like what you see below. To be on the safe side, choose Select > Save Selection, and save the selection outline as an alpha channel in the Channels palette. That way, if you need it again, you can go to Select > Load Selection, and reload it.
      Since the flower's background is quite dark in the lower left quadrant, and fairly bright in the upper right, I don't want to include any of the background tones when I move it onto the evenly lit ferns.
      Should your image happen to be on a background which is very different from that of its destination, it is very important that you take care not to include any background remnants in the selection. They would move with the selection, and show as a fringe, or halo around the moved image. I'll show you what I mean, on the next page.
Continue on page three

Copyright © 2000 by Jay Arraich.
All rights reserved.
All photographs copyright ©2000 by Jay Arraich
jay@arraich.com