Photoshop® CS3 for Dummies®

Chapter 8. Fine-Tuning Your Fixes

In This Chapter

• Telling Photoshop where to work with selections

• Masking for layer visibility and to protect parts of your image

• Keeping your options open with adjustment layers

There you are, repainting the bedroom — all by yourself, saving money, being productive — and it's time to do the windows. Now, you probably don't want to paint over the glass, right? Just the frame, the sash, the sill, those little whatch-ya-call-its between the panes, right? There are several ways you can avoid painting the glass. You can use a little brush and paint very carefully. You can use a larger brush, paint faster, and scrape the excess from the glass afterward. You can grab the masking tape, protect the glass, and paint as sloppily as you like — when the tape comes off, the glass is paintfree.

Those are unbelievably similar to the choices that you have in Photoshop when you need to work on only a part of your image. You can zoom in and use tools, dragging the cursor over only those pixels that you want to change (just like using a tiny paintbrush). You can use the History Brush feature (which I introduce in Chapter 1) to restore parts of the image to the original state (like scraping the glass). You can isolate the area of the image you want to change with a selection (much like protecting the rest of the image with tape).

In this chapter, you read about getting ready to make changes to your image rather than actually making those changes. You can isolate groups of ...