January 2008 Digital Group Meeting - Layer Masks

Meeting Notes March 2009 to 2018.
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spb
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Joined: Tue Mar 25, 2008 7:04 pm

January 2008 Digital Group Meeting - Layer Masks

Post by spb » Fri Apr 04, 2008 8:58 pm

27 members were keen to beat off Christmas cabin-fever this evening.

NEWS;
New rules about carrying Lithium Ion batteries on flights to and within the USA see here

EPSON PRINTERS;
The current enthusiast photo printers from Epson are -

For A4;
R800 - £200, 7 pigment inks + Gloss Optimiser, CD printing

For A3/A3+;
R2400 - £450, 8 pigment inks including 2 extra greys especially for monochrome prints
R1800 - £380, 7 pigment inks + Gloss Optimiser, CD printing
R1900 - £350, 7 pigment inks + Gloss Optimiser, CD printing (replacing the R1800)
Photo 1400 - £240, 6 dye inks, CD printing (replaces the venerable 1290)

LAYER MASKS;
These have been an invaluable feature of Photoshop since early days but are not officially supported by Photoshop Elements except as part of an Adjustment Layer. Once owners of Elements have mastered Layers I would recommend going here where there are detailed instructions for fully activating Layer Masks within any recent version of Photoshop Elements.

Normally, when you erase a hole in a layer, the layer below shows through the hole. A Layer Mask achieves this same effect but the great bonus is that you can come back tomorrow and change the shape or transparency of the hole - basically that's all it does. The Layers Palette should be open when using Layer Masks. Add a Layer Mask to any non-background layer, click on it and then paint with black, white or grey paint. Where the mask is black, the associated layer is invisible (ie erased), where it is white, the associated layer is visible (ie opaque) and where grey, it is semi-transparent. Anything that you can do to a regular layer you can do to a layer mask - use selections, filters, levels adjustments etc. Click on the layer thumbnail or the layer mask thumbnail to switch between working on one or the other. To remove a layer mask from the layers palette, drag and drop it to the bin.

Shortcuts with Layer masks;
- Shift + click on the Layer Mask thumbnail to switch it on or off
- Alt + click on the Layer Mask thumbnail to see the actual Layer Mask full-screen
- Ctrl + click on the Layer Mask thumbnail to make a selection from the Layer Mask
- key D to set the foreground and background colours to the defaults of black and white
- key X to switch between foreground and background colours

There are many tutorials on the web, mainly aimed at Photoshop users, but the principles are the same for Elements see here for an example. You don't need layer masks but once you start using them you won't be able to stop!

COLOUR TO MONO CONVERSION;
Bob Marshall and I have put together a summary of some of the popular methods by which colour images can be converted to black and white. See the Mono Group page of the APS Website for this paper.

We reviewed those methods appropriate to Elements users and concluded that the double Hue/Saturation Adjustment Layer method described in this paper is probably the most flexible and powerful.

NEXT MEETING;

Will be on Thursday 7th February when Peter Jones will be hosting the meeting.

Cheers, Steve Brabner

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