Photo by Jacob Cunningham
Hello Scott. And friends of Scott. Not to mention you people who know friends of folks who at one time thought they knew Scott or saw him once. As if in a dream.
My name is Deke. But enough about me. What’s more important is what I have to offer. In celebration of The Day After Scott’s Birthday, I bring you the most special Eighth of July gift ever. A video. A Web-based, streaming video. With a mouse cursor moving around the screen and me talking and everything. (!)
The topic of this video is masking. Over the course of things, we’ll take this girl:
With all her hair and rambunctious attitude.
And blend her into this composition:
Granted, the end result is over the top. And a bit silly. (Forgive me, I learned design from Mad magazine. Or was it Super Mario Brothers? I forget.) But it’s impeccably executed. And it demonstrates a point: If you can merge that hair and that dress and that girl against that background, you can do anything.
And by “anything,” I mean anything. Turn lead into gold. Climb vertical walls. Fly. With glistening, radioactive abs of steel.
I call my intensive video “The Essential Approach to Masking in Photoshop.” It’s not a step-by-step recipe. It’s not a magic bullet. It’s an overarching roadmap of the tried-and-true approach to masking a complex image. In about 30 minutes (I told you it was intensive!), you and I will create a full-blown mask—from scratch, mind you—and employ said mask to composite a complex foreground against a foreign background. In Photoshop.
This is not an inspirational video. This is a training video. (I’m sorry, but it’s what I do.) It’s carefully crafted and tightly produced. And believe it or not, it moves along at a fairly brisk pace.
Definitely click the full-screen button for every bit of gloriously compressed detail in this 1280 by 800-pixel movie.
Watch. Rinse. Repeat.
Along the way, I mention some links. They are these:
-For the images, fotolia.com/deke
-For the videos, lynda.com/deke
-For the books, deke.oreilly.com
-For more free masking videos, dekedotcom.blip.tv
-For still more videos, youtube.com/dekepod
-For 24/7 love action, deke.com
Now stop reading this and watch the video. And have a really awesome day.
–Deke
“And by “anything,” I mean anything.” well said Deke. I missed to watch the video but will follow from now on.
masking an image The term “mask” means it hides the face from view. In image editing, masking is needed when you want to isolate a portion of an image from the whole picture where the boarders are not well defined and sharp.