Photoshop Tutorial No 3: Using the Quick Mask Tool to Overlay the Background with a Texture

You will learn how to use the Photoshop quick mask tool to select the background of an image and then overlay the background with another image or texture.

What you need if you want to follow this tutorial:

You can download the texture I used here: http://www.texturecafe.com/volume-3-grunge-grunge/

Note: The video is at best quality if you watch it in HD! Just click on the HD button inside the video and watch it on Vimeo.

New: You can also download a PDF version of this tutorial here.

Summary:

1. Open the main image on that you want to replace the background.

2. Click on menu: Select | Color Range, then click with they eyedropper and eyedropper + tool on the background until you get a rough selection of the background.

3. Fine tune the selection with the Fuzziness slider. Its does not need to be perfect at this time. This will just save some time later with the quick mask.

4. Click OK and you will see the selection around the background.

5. From this point we manually work on the selection.

6. Click on the quick mask tool (Square with a circle inside). It’s the lowest icon on the tools palette.

7. Now the selection turns into a transparent red color overlay.

• Paint with black over the area you want to mask out and with white vice versa.
• If you choose black color for the brush you will actually add to the mask and with white you will delete from the mask.

8. Choose a zoom level of 300-400 percent. Its more work but the mask will be very precise.

9. Choose a brush with an a hardness of around 90% and 100% opacity. If the brush is too soft the edges will get too fuzzy and if the brush is too hard edges might get too hard. It all depends a bit on the image.

10. Paint the edges first. In this example I choose to paint over the model and revert the selection later but either way is ok.

11. If you paint over the edge don’t panic just select white color for the brush and delete what is too much.

12. After the edges are perfect paint the inside.

13. Once you think the mask is finished click on the quick mask icon. Now you see the selection again. If you spot any tiny areas which are not selected click on the quick mask icon again and paint over that area again. Sometimes it is easier to spot little imperfection like that.

14. Done with the mask? Then click on the quick mask tool again and save the mask with Menu | Select | Save Selection

15. Open the image with the texture, select all (CTRL + A) and then copy it (CTRL + C)

16. Return to the main image and press CTRL + V to paste the texture on top of the background layer.

17. If the image size of the texture does not fit to the main image hit CTRL + T and the pull the handles to resize it.

18. Make sure you have the texture layer selected and then load the selection we created before. Menu | Selection | Load Selection.

19. Now, in this case the background is selected but we want to reveal the model of the background layer. So we need to invert the selection. Menu | Selection | Inverse.

20. I also choose to feather the selection slightly by 5 pixels so the edges are not too hard. Again that step depends on the main image. It might not be necessary at all.

21. Now press CTRL + X and the model in the underlaying (background layer) is revealed.

22. The edges look good but I want to change the layer blending mode to Overlay and the lower the opacity to around 50%. that way the overall effect looks more believable in my opinion.

Done!

This is the final result:

Photoshop Tutorial No 3, Quick Mask Tool