Quick Mask Mode

“Quick Mask” is a misnomer for what it does actually.
First and foremost there is nothing quick about the “Quick Mask” and second, it is really not a mask but a temporary selection.
“Quick Mask” is actually nothing more than another tool to select it.
Let us take a picture from which I wish to select the hand with the Quick Mask tool.
I hear you thinking, in this picture, it will be much faster if you do it with the Magic Wand tool.
True, but in this example, I will explain how the Quick Time Mode works.
So, we open our photo and click the “Quick Time Mode” button.

In the “Channels” palette, we get an extra channel called Quick Mask.
We set the foreground and background color to black / white.
A quick way to do this is to press “D” key on your keyboard.
We select our Brush tool and start to color in black, our foreground color.

Why? Because we are coloring a (temporarily) mask and this can only be in black or white, as you have already seen in the previous lesson.
Everything that is black, is not selected, everything that is white, is selected. Do you remember?
If you now have colored too much, you can always remove it by changing the foreground color to white and color the excess black color with white. This removes the black.

Black! That looks red.
Right, but when you look in the Quick Mask channel you see that it is indeed black.
And hmm, black is not selected, white is selected. Then, why is my selection displayed in black in the Quick Mask Channel?
Well, can we change both of these in the “Quick Mask Options” dialog box.
To open it double click the Quick Mask Mode button.

To change the color double-click the color, change the transparency by giving a different value and select the “Selected Areas” at the top to set the color of the display.

Click OK when you are satisfied.
To switch back to RGB view, click the Quick Mask Mode button again.
In the picture you see what you’ve selected.
As long as your selection remains selected, you can switch back to the “Quick Mask Mode” by pressing the respective button.
But when you undo the selection, you also lose your Quick Mask Channel.

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