Sams Teach Yourself Adobe Photoshop CS3 in 24 Hours

Chapter 12. Using Masks

<feature><title>What You’ll Learn in This Hour:</title>

• Applying Masks

• Using Quick Mask

• Layer Masks

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Masks can be your best friends when you’re working on a complicated picture. They can also be a darned nuisance, simply because there are several kinds of masks that you can apply to your image, and they do somewhat different things. So you not only have to create a mask, you also have to know ahead of time what you want the mask to do for you, and then you have to apply the right kind of mask.

So, what exactly is a mask? In a sense, any selection that you make is a mask because it permits you to do something that affects only the selected area, effectively masking anything that’s not selected. A mask enables you to ...