Photoshop 6 for Windows Bible- P15

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Photoshop 6 for Windows Bible- P15:If you are reading this foreword, it probably means that you’ve purchased a copy of Adobe Photoshop 6.0, and for that I and the rest of the Photoshop team at Adobe thank you. If you own a previous edition of the Photoshop Bible, you probably know what to expect. If not, then get ready for an interesting trip.

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Chapter 9 ✦ Masks and Extractions 389 60-pixel soft brush shape, and dragged outward from various points along the perimeter of the skull. As demonstrated in Figure 9-6, combining airbrush and mask is as useful in Photoshop as it is in the real world. Figure 9-5: Dragging with the smudge tool smeared colors from pixels outside the selection mask without changing the appearance of those pixels. Figure 9-6: I dragged around the skull with the airbrush to distinguish it further from its background. Pretty cool effect, huh? Well, if this is not your cup of tea, maybe you can track down a teenager who will appreciate it.
390 Part III ✦ Selections, Masks, and Filters Working in Quick Mask Mode Selection masks give you an idea of what masks are all about, but they only scrape the surface. The rest of this chapter revolves around using masks to define complex selection outlines. The most straightforward environment for creating a mask is the quick mask mode. In the quick mask mode, a selection is expressed as a rubylith overlay. All dese- lected areas appear coated with red, and selected areas appear without red coating, as shown in the top examples of Color Plate 9-1. You can then edit the mask as desired and exit quick mask mode to return to the standard selection outline. The quick mask mode is — as its name implies — expeditious and convenient, with none of the trappings or permanence of more conventional masks. It’s kind of like a fast food restaurant — you use it when you aren’t overly concerned about quality and you want to get in and out in a hurry. How the quick mask mode works Typically, you’ll at least want to rough out a selection with the standard selection tools before entering the quick mask mode. Then you can concentrate on refining and modifying your selection inside the quick mask, rather than having to create the selection from scratch. (Naturally, this is only a rule of thumb. I violate the rule several times throughout this chapter, but only because the quick mask mode and I are such tight friends.) To enter the quick mask mode, click the quick mask mode icon in the toolbox, as I’ve done in Figure 9-7. Or press Q. When I pressed Q after wreaking my most recent havoc on the extinct antelope skull, I got the image shown in Figure 9-7. The skull receives the mask because it is not selected. (In Figure 9-7, the mask appears as a light gray coating; on your color screen, the mask appears in red.) The area outside the skull looks the same as it always did because it’s selected and, therefore, not masked. Notice that the selection outline disappears when you enter the quick mask mode. This happens because the outline temporarily ceases to exist. Any operations you apply affect the mask itself and leave the underlying image untouched. When you click the marching ants mode icon (to the left of the quick mask mode icon) or press Q, Photoshop converts the mask back into a selection outline and again enables you to edit the image. Note If you click the quick mask mode icon and nothing changes on screen, your com- puter isn’t broken; you simply didn’t select anything before you entered quick mask mode. When nothing is selected, Photoshop makes the whole image open for edit- ing. In other words, everything’s selected. (Only a smattering of commands under the Edit, Layer, and Select menus require something to be selected before they work.) If everything is selected, the mask is white; therefore, the quick mask
Chapter 9 ✦ Masks and Extractions 391 overlay is transparent and you don’t see any difference on screen. This is another reason why it’s better to select something before you enter the quick mask mode — you get an immediate sense you’re accomplishing something. Quick mask icon Figure 9-7: Click the quick mask mode icon (highlighted in the toolbox) to instruct Photoshop to express the selection temporarily as a grayscale image. Also, Photoshop enables you to specify whether you want the red mask coating to cover selected areas or deselected areas. For information on how to change this setting, see “Changing the red coating,” later in this chapter. In quick mask mode, you can edit the mask in the following ways: ✦ Subtracting from a selection: Paint with black to add red coating and, thus, deselect areas of the image, as demonstrated in the top half of Figure 9-8. This means you can selectively protect portions of your image by merely painting over them. ✦ Adding to a selection: Paint with white to remove red coating and, thus, add to the selection outline. You can use the eraser tool to whittle away at the masked area (assuming the background color is set to white). Or you can swap the foreground and background colors so you can paint in white with one of the painting tools.
392 Part III ✦ Selections, Masks, and Filters Figure 9-8: After subtracting some of the selected area inside the eye socket by painting in black with the paintbrush tool (top), I feathered the outline by painting with white, using a soft 45-pixel brush shape (bottom). ✦ Adding feathered selections: If you paint with a shade of gray, you add feath- ered selections. You also can feather an outline by painting with black or white with a soft brush shape, as shown in the bottom image in Figure 9-8. ✦ Clone selection outlines: If you have a selection outline that you want to repeat in several locations throughout the image, the quick mask is your friend. Select the transparent area with one of the standard selection tools and Ctrl+Alt-drag it to a new location in the image, as shown in Figure 9-9. Although I use the lasso tool in the figure, the magic wand tool also works
Chapter 9 ✦ Masks and Extractions 393 well for this purpose. To select an antialiased selection outline with the wand tool, set the Tolerance value to about 10 and be sure the Anti-aliased check box is active. Then click inside the selection. It’s that easy. Figure 9-9: To clone the eye socket selection, I lassoed around it (top) and Ctrl+Alt-dragged it (bottom). ✦ Transform selection outlines: You can scale or rotate a selection indepen- dently of the image, just as you can with the Transform Selection command (covered in Chapter 8). Enter the quick mask mode, select the mask using one of the standard selection tools, and choose Edit ➪ Free Transform or press Ctrl+T. (See Chapter 12 for more information on Free Transform and related commands.)
394 Part III ✦ Selections, Masks, and Filters These are only a few of the unique effects you can achieve by editing a selection in the quick mask mode. Others involve tools and capabilities I haven’t yet discussed, such as filters and color corrections. When you finish editing your selection outlines, click the marching ants mode icon (to the left of the quick mask mode icon) or press Q again to return to the marching ants mode. Your selection outlines again appear flanked by marching ants, and all tools and commands return to their normal image-editing functions. Figure 9-10 shows the results of switching to the marching ants mode and deleting the contents of the selection outlines created in the last examples of the previous two figures. Figure 9-10: The results of deleting the regions selected in the bottom examples of Figures 9-8 (top) and 9-9 (bottom). Kind of makes me want to rent It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown. I mean, who wouldn’t give this antelope a rock?
Chapter 9 ✦ Masks and Extractions 395 Tip As demonstrated in the top example of Figure 9-10, the quick mask mode offers a splendid environment for feathering one selection outline, while leaving another hard-edged or antialiased. Granted, because most selection tools offer built-in feath- ering options, you can accomplish this task without resorting to the quick mask mode. But the quick mask mode enables you to change feathering selectively after drawing selection outlines, something you can’t accomplish with Select ➪ Feather. The quick mask mode also enables you to see exactly what you’re doing. Kind of makes those marching ants look piddly and insignificant, huh? Changing the red coating By default, the protected region of an image appears in translucent red in the quick mask mode, but if your image contains a lot of red, the mask can be difficult to see. Luckily, you can change it to any color and any degree of opacity that you like. To do so, double-click the quick mask icon in the toolbox (or double-click the Quick Mask item in the Channels palette) to display the dialog box shown in Figure 9-11. ✦ Color Indicates: Choose Selected Areas to reverse the color coating so that the translucent red coating covers selected areas, and deselected areas appear normally. Choose Masked Areas (the default setting) to cover dese- lected areas in color. Tip You can reverse the color coating without ever entering the Quick Mask Options dialog box. Simply Alt-click the quick mask icon in the toolbox to toggle between coating the masked or selected portions of the image. The icon itself changes to reflect your choice. Figure 9-11: Double-click the quick mask mode icon to access the Quick Mask Options dialog box. You then can change the color and opacity of the protected or selected areas when viewed in the quick mask mode. ✦ Color: Click the Color icon to display the Color Picker dialog box and select a different color coating. (If you don’t know how to use this dialog box, see the “Using the Color Picker” section of Chapter 4.) You can lift a color from the image with the eyedropper after the Color Picker dialog box comes up, but you probably want to use a color that isn’t in the image so that you can better see the mask. ✦ Opacity: Enter a value to change the opacity of the translucent color that coats the image. A value of 100 percent makes the coating absolutely opaque.
396 Part III ✦ Selections, Masks, and Filters Change the color coating to achieve the most acceptable balance between being able to view and edit your selection and being able to view your image. For exam- ple, the default red coating shows up poorly on my grayscale screen shots, so I changed the color of the coating to light blue and the Opacity value to 65 percent before shooting the screens featured in Figures 9-7 through 9-9. Gradations as masks If you think that the Feather command is a hot tool for creating softened selection outlines, wait until you get a load of gradations in the quick mask mode. There’s no better way to create fading effects than selecting an image with the one of the gradi- ent tools. Fading an image Consider the U.S. Capitol building shown in Figure 9-12. Whether or not you care for the folks who reside inside — personally, I’m sick of all this cynicism about the gov- ernment, but I’m happy to exploit it for a few cheap laughs — you must admit, this is one beautiful building. Still, you may reckon the structure would be even more impressive if it were to fade into view out of a river of hot Hawaiian lava, like the one to the Capitol’s immediate right. Well, you’re in luck, because this is one of the easiest effects to pull off in Photoshop. Figure 9-12: You can create a linear gradient in the quick mask mode to make the Capitol (left) fade out of the lava (right).
Chapter 9 ✦ Masks and Extractions 397 Switch to the quick mask mode by pressing Q. Then use the gradient tool to draw a linear gradation from black to white. (Chapter 6 explains exactly how to do so.) The white portion of the gradation represents the area you want to select. I decided to select the top portion of the Capitol, so I drew the gradation from the top of the sec- ond tier to the top of the flag, as shown in the first example of Figure 9-13. Because the gradient line is a little hard to see, I’ve added a little arrow to show the direction of the drag. (To see the mask in full color, check out the first image in Color Plate 9-2.) Figure 9-13: After drawing a linear gradation in the quick mask mode near the center of the image (left), I hid the image and applied the Add Noise filter with an Amount of 24 (right). Banding can be a problem when you use a gradation as a mask. To eliminate the banding effect, therefore, apply the Add Noise filter at a low setting several times. To create the right example in Figure 9-13, I applied Add Noise using an Amount value of 24 and the Uniform distribution option. Tip In the right example of Figure 9-13, I hid the image so that only the mask is visible. As the figure shows, the Channels palette lists the Quick Mask item in italics. This is because Photoshop regards the quick mask as a temporary channel. You can hide the image and view the mask in black and white by clicking the eyeball in front of the color composite view, in this case RGB. Or just press the tilde key (~) to hide the image. Press tilde again to view mask and image together.
398 Part III ✦ Selections, Masks, and Filters To apply the gradation as a selection, I returned to the marching ants mode by again pressing Q. I then Ctrl-dragged the selected portion of the Capitol and dropped it into the lava image to achieve the effect shown in Figure 9-14. I could say something about Congress rising up from the ashes, but I have no idea what I’d mean by this. For the color version of this splendid image, see Color Plate 9-2. Figure 9-14: The result of selecting the top portion of the Capitol using a gradient mask and then Ctrl-dragging and dropping the selection into the lava image. Applying special effects gradually You also can use gradations in the quick mask mode to fade the outcomes of filters and other automated special effects. For example, I wanted to apply a filter around the edges of the Lincoln colossus that appears in Figure 9-15. I began by deselecting everything in the image (Ctrl+D) and switching to the quick mask mode. Then I selected the Gradient tool, selected the linear gradient style icon on the Options bar, and selected the Foreground to Transparent gradient from the Gradient drop- down palette. I also selected the Transparency check box on the Options bar.
Chapter 9 ✦ Masks and Extractions 399 Figure 9-15: This time around, my intention is to surround Lincoln with a gradual filtering effect. I pressed D to make the foreground color black and the background color white. Then I dragged with the linear gradient tool from each of the four edges of the image inward to create a series of short gradations that trace around the bound- aries of the image, as shown in Figure 9-16. (As you can see, I’ve hidden the image so that you see the mask in black and white.) Because I’ve selected the Foreground to Transparent option, Photoshop adds each gradation to the previous gradation. Figure 9-16: Inside the quick mask mode, I dragged from each of the four edges with the gradient tool (as indicated by the arrows).
400 Part III ✦ Selections, Masks, and Filters To jumble the pixels in the mask, I applied Filter ➪ Noise ➪ Add Noise with an Amount value of 24. You see the effect in Figure 9-16. Tip The only problem is that I want to select the outside of the image, not the inside. So I need the edges to appear black and the inside to appear white, the opposite of what you see in Figure 9-16. No problem. All I do is press Ctrl+I (Image ➪ Adjust ➪ Invert) to invert the image. Inverting inside the quick mask mode produces the same effect as applying Select ➪ Inverse to a selection. Finally, I switched back to the marching ants mode by again pressing Q. Then I applied Filter ➪ Render ➪ Clouds to get the atmospheric effect you see in Figure 9-17. Yes, he’s Abe the Illusionist — Lincoln as you’ve never seen him before! Once he gets to Vegas, he’ll wipe the floor with David Copperfield. Figure 9-17: After switching back to the marching ants mode, I chose Filter ➪ Render ➪ Clouds to create the foggy effect shown here. Tip Notice the corners in the mask in Figure 9-16? These corners are rounded, but you can achieve all kinds of corner effects with the linear gradient tool. For harsher cor- ners, select the Foreground to Background gradient and select Lighten from the Mode pop-up menu on the Options bar. For some really unusual corner treatments, try out the Difference and Exclusion brush modes. Wild stuff.
Chapter 9 ✦ Masks and Extractions 401 Creating gradient arrows A few sections ago, Figure 9-13 featured an upward-pointing arrow that faded into view with a dark halo around it. I could have created this arrowhead in a drawing program to get nice sharp points and smooth outlines. But I chose to create it in Photoshop, so I could take advantage of two options drawing programs don’t offer: gradient lines and halos. Naturally, you can create both in the quick mask mode. The following steps explain how to add cool fading arrows to any image, as demon- strated in Figures 9-18 and 9-19. The steps involve the quick mask mode, the gradi- ent tool, the Fill command, and good old Backspace. STEPS: Creating Fading Arrows with Halos 1. Choose the New Snapshot command from the History palette menu. Photoshop adds a new snapshot thumbnail at the top of the palette. Click in front of it to make it the source state. Now you’re ready to revert to this state if need be, as called for in Step 15. 2. Deselect everything (Ctrl+D) and switch to the quick mask mode (Q). The image should appear absolutely normal. 3. Select the line tool (press U as necessary to get the tool). Also press Enter to display the Options bar, if it’s not already visible. First, click the Fill Region button to set the line tool into raster mode — that is, so that it creates a pixel- based line. (The Fill Region button is the third mode button and looks like a solid square.) Enter the line width in the Weight option box to suit your needs. Then click the down-pointing arrow at the end of the strip of shape icons to display the Arrowheads palette and enter the arrowhead values that you want to use. To create my first arrows (the ones that come inward from the corners in Figure 9-19), I set the Size value to 20 and the Width, Length, and Concavity values in the Arrowheads palette to 400, 600, and 20, respectively. I selected the End option box to append the arrowheads at the end of my lines. (See Chapter 6 if you want more information about working with the line tool options in Photoshop 6.) 4. Press D to switch to the default colors. 5. Draw your line, which shows up in red. If you don’t get it right the first time — as is often the case with this tool — press Ctrl+Z and try again. The beauty of drawing a line in the quick mask mode is you can edit the line after the fact without damaging the image. (You could also do the same on a sepa- rate layer, but the quick mask mode affords you a little more flexibility in this specific exercise.) 6. Select the gradient tool (G) and select the Foreground to Background gradi- ent from the Gradients drop-down palette on the Options bar. Also set the Opacity value to 100 percent and choose Lighten from the Mode pop-up menu.
402 Part III ✦ Selections, Masks, and Filters 7. Use the gradient tool to fade the base of the line. Drag from the point at which you want the line to begin to fade, down to the base of the line. Try to make the direction of your drag parallel to the line itself, thus ensuring a smooth fade. The first example in Figure 9-18 shows me in the process of drag- ging along one of my arrows with the gradient tool. The small white arrow shows the direction of my drag. (The black line shows the actual cursor you see on screen.) The second image shows the result of the drag. Figure 9-18: Drag from the point at which you want the arrow to begin fading to the base of the line (left). Keep the drag parallel to the line itself (indicated here by the white arrow) to fade the line out smoothly (right). 8. Choose Image ➪ Adjust ➪ Invert (Ctrl+I). This inverts the quick mask, thus making the arrow the selected area. 9. Copy the quick mask to a separate channel. Drag the Quick Mask item in the Channels palette onto the little page icon at the bottom of the palette to copy the quick mask to a permanent mask channel. You’ll need it again. 10. Press Q to switch back to the marching ants mode. Your arrow appears as a selection outline. 11. Expand the selection to create the halo. Choose Select ➪ Modify ➪ Expand and enter the desired value, based on the size and resolution of your image. I entered 6 to expand the selection outline 6 pixels. 12. Choose Select ➪ Feather (Ctrl+Alt+D). Enter the same value and press Enter. 13. Fill the selection with white for a light halo, or black for a dark one. I wanted a white halo, so I pressed D to restore the default foreground and background colors. Then I pressed Ctrl+Backspace to fill the selection with white. 14. Ctrl-click the Quick Mask Copy item in the Channels palette. This regains your original arrow-shaped selection outline. (I explain channel masks in detail later in this chapter, but for now, just Ctrl-click.)
Chapter 9 ✦ Masks and Extractions 403 15. Press Ctrl+Alt+Backspace. If you set the source state properly in Step 1, this shortcut reverts the portion of the image inside the arrows to its original appearance. 16. Copy the selection to an independent layer. Press Ctrl+J or choose Layer ➪ New ➪ Layer via Copy. 17. Fill the layered arrow with a color. Change the foreground color to anything you like and press Shift+Alt+Backspace to fill the arrow (and only the arrow). 18. Choose Multiply from the pop-up menu in the Layers palette. This burns the colored arrow into the image. Then set the Opacity value to the desired level. I set the Opacity to 40 percent. After that, I simply kept adding more and more arrows by repeating the process to create the effect shown in Figure 9-19. I saved occasional snapshot states so that I could create arrows on top of arrows. Most notably, I made a snapshot of the image before adding the last, big arrow that shoots up from the bottom. Then I filled the arrow with the snapshot to bring back bits and pieces of a few of the other arrows. (Had I not filled back in time via the History palette, the arrow fragments behind the big arrow would have disappeared.) Figure 9-19: I don’t know whether this guy’s in store for a cold front or what, but if you ever need to annotate an image with arrows, this gradient- arrowhead trick is certainly the way to do it.
404 Part III ✦ Selections, Masks, and Filters Generating Masks Automatically In addition to the quick mask mode and selection masking, Photoshop offers a few tools that automate the masking process — well, automate some parts of the pro- cess. You still need to provide some input to tell the program exactly what you’re trying to mask. Photoshop 5.5 added a trio of tools designed to select the foreground of an image while cutting away the background: the background eraser, magic eraser, and Extract command. I cover the two erasers along with the plain old eraser tool in Chapter 7 because all three erasers share some common characteristics. The next section in this chapter explores the Extract command, which Adobe upgraded significantly in Photoshop 6. Following that, I explain how to generate a mask based on a range of colors in your image. Extracting a subject from its surroundings Like the background eraser and magic eraser, the Extract command aims to sepa- rate — extract, if you will — an image element from its surroundings. After you draw a rough highlight around the subject you want to retain, Photoshop analyzes the situation and automatically deletes everything but the subject. In my estimation, though, Extract is only slightly more powerful than the background eraser and sev- eral times more complex. Some images respond very well to the command, others do not. Photoshop 6 That said, Extract can produce reasonably good results if you get the steps right. And in Photoshop 6, Extract offers some added features — most notably, an Undo function — that improve on the first incarnation of the command. So take Extract for a test drive, as follows: 1. Choose Extract from the Image menu. Or use the keyboard shortcut, Ctrl+Alt+X. Either way, Photoshop displays the large Extract window shown in Figure 9-20. 2. Select the edge highlighter tool. Most likely, this tool is already active, but if not, press B to select it. 3. Outline the subject that you want to retain. In my case, I want to delete the background, so I traced around the lion, as shown in Figure 9-20. Be sure to either completely encircle the subject or, if the subject is partially cropped, trace all the way up against the outer boundaries of the photograph. Tip Often, it’s easier to Shift-click around the perimeter of an image than drag manually. Shift-clicking creates a straight highlight from one click point to the next. As long as you do a reasonably careful job, the performance of the Extract command won’t be impaired.
Chapter 9 ✦ Masks and Extractions 405 Edge highlighter Fill Eraser Figure 9-20: After tracing around the portion of the image you want to retain, click inside the outline with the fill tool. Photoshop 6 Turn on the Smart Highlighting check box, in the Tool Options section of the Extract dialog box, to get some assistance in drawing your outline. Smart Highlighting seeks out edges in the image and places the highlight along them. When you turn on Smart Highlighting, your cursor becomes a circle with four inward-pointing lines. Keep the center of the circle over the edge between the subject and the background as you drag. This feature works best when your subject has well-defined edges, of course. Note that you can’t Shift-click with the tool to draw straight segments when Smart Highlighting is active. Tip Ctrl-drag to temporarily turn off Smart Highlighting without deselecting the check box. Or go the opposite direction: Deselect the check box and then Ctrl-drag to temporarily take advantage of Smart Highlighting. 4. As you trace, use the bracket keys, [ and ], to make the brush larger or smaller. When you work with brushes from 1 to 9 pixels in diameter, each press of [ or ] changes the brush size by 1 pixel. The increment of change gets larger as you increase the brush size.
406 Part III ✦ Selections, Masks, and Filters Tip Small brush sizes result in sharper edges. Larger brush sizes are better for fragile, intricate detailing, such as hair, foliage, wispy fabric, bits of steel wool, thin pasta — you get the idea. Photoshop 6 5. If you make a mistake, press Ctrl+Z. As I mentioned before, the Extract win- dow now has a much needed Undo function. But you get only one Undo level here — you can only undo and redo your last stroke with the highlighter tool. If you want to erase more of the highlight, drag over the botched region with the eraser tool (press E to access it from the keyboard) or use Alt-drag with the edge highlighter tool. To delete the entire highlight and start over, press Alt+Backspace. 6. Navigate as needed. If you can’t see all of your image, you can access the hand tool by pressing the spacebar or clicking the hand tool icon. You can also zoom by pressing Ctrl+plus or Ctrl+minus, or by using the zoom tool. Photoshop 6 7. Select the fill tool. It’s the one that looks like a paint bucket. To select the fill tool from the keyboard, press G, same as you do to select the paint bucket in the regular Photoshop toolbox. (Formerly, the shortcut for both the fill tool and paint bucket was K.) 8. Click inside the subject of the image. The highlighted outline should fill with color. If the fill color spills outside the outline, then there’s probably a break in your outline someplace. Press Ctrl+Z to undo the fill and then scroll the image with the hand tool to find the break. Patch it with the edge highlighter and then click with the fill tool again. Tip You also can click inside a filled area with the fill tool or eraser to remove the fill. 9. Click the Preview button. Before you can apply your prospective mask, you need to preview it so you can gauge the finished effect, as in Figure 9-21. Photoshop 6 If you Shift-click with the fill tool in Step 8, Photoshop fills the outline and processes the preview automatically, saving you the trouble of clicking the Preview button. Photoshop 6 10. Edit the mask as needed. You have several tools at your disposal in Photoshop 6. The tools are labeled in Figure 9-21; you can read about them in the list following these steps. 11. Click the OK button to delete the masked portion of the image. If the image was flat, Photoshop floats it to a separate layer. You can then use the move tool to drag the masked image against a different background. In Figure 9-22, I set my lion against an Italian landscape. The composite isn’t perfect, but it’s not half bad for five to ten minutes of work.
Chapter 9 ✦ Masks and Extractions 407 Eyedropper Cleanup Edge touchup Figure 9-21: Click the Preview button to gauge the appearance of the final masked image. Figure 9-22: I believe this particular lion is stuffed, but even a dead creature may enjoy a change in its diorama.
408 Part III ✦ Selections, Masks, and Filters 12. After you exit the Extract window, fix any problems using the background eraser and history brush. Use the background eraser (explained in Chapter 7) to erase stray pixels that you wish the Extract command had deleted. Use the history brush to restore details that you wish the Extract command hadn’t deleted. Back in Step 10, I alluded to ways that you can refine the mask within the Extract dialog box. In Photoshop 6, you can use the following techniques to touch up the mask before clicking OK to create it: Photoshop ✦ Drag with the cleanup tool (C) to change mask opacity: Press the number 6 keys to adjust the pressure of the tool and thus alter the amount of opacity that the tool subtracts. To erase to full transparency, press 0, as you do when working with the eraser on a layer. Press 9 for 90 percent transparency, 8 for 80 percent, and so on. Alt-drag to add opacity. ✦ Drag along the boundaries of the mask with the edge touchup tool ( T ) to sharpen the mask edges. If the boundary between mask and subject isn’t well defined, dragging with this tool adds opacity to the subject and removes it from the mask. In other words, it turns soft, feathery edges into crisp, clearly defined edges. Again, you can press the number keys to adjust the impact of the tool. ✦ Raise the Smooth value to remove stray pixels from the mask: A high value smoothes out the edges around the image and fills in holes. Basically, if your edges are a big mess, give this option a try. ✦ Drag with the edge highlighter or eraser tools to edit the mask boundary. When you select either tool, the original mask highlight reappears, and the tools work as they do when you initially draw the highlight. After you adjust the highlight, Shift-click inside it to redraw and preview the adjusted mask. ✦ Choose an option from the Show pop-up menu to toggle between the origi- nal highlight and the extracted image preview. Figure 9-23 spotlights this option. You can press X to toggle between the two views without bothering with the pop-up menu. Figure 9-23: To toggle between the extraction preview and the original highlight, choose the view you want from the Show pop-up menu or just press X.