Quick Mask mode

Quick Mask is actually a misnomer for what it does. First and foremost there is nothing “fast” to the Quick Mask and second, it’s really not a mask but a temporary selection.
Quick Mask is actually nothing more than another tool to select.
The fun of a quick mask is that you use a drawing tool as a selection tool to make a selection.

Let us take a picture of a tough guy that I wish to select with the quick mask.

I hear you thinking, it will be much faster to select with the Magic Wand tool than the “Quick Selection” tool in this picture.

True, but in this example, I will explain how the mask works quickly, so we open our photo and click the ” Quick Mask Mode ” button.

An addional channel called a “Quick Mask” channel appears in the “channels” panel.
We set the foreground and background colors to black / white. A quick way to do is press the “D” key on your keyboard.
We select the brush tool in the tool bar and start to color in black, our foreground color. Why Black? Because when we color a (temporarily) mask, it can only be in black, white or a shade of gray as you’ve already seen in a previous lesson.

Everything that is black, is not selected, everything that is white, is selected. Do you remember?

Now, if you have colored it too much, you can always remove it by changing the foreground to white, and removing the excess color by coloring it with white. This removes the black.

mmm, black! that looks red.

Right, but when you look in the “Quick Mask” channel, you will see that it is indeed black.

And hmm, black is not selected, white is selected.

Why does my selection then appears in black in the “Quick Mask” channel?

Well, we can change it 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, give a different value to change the transparency and set the colored display to “masked areas” in the top box.

Click OK when you are satisfied. To switch back to RGB view, click again on the Quick Mask Mode button. In the picture, you will 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 deselect your slection, the “Quick Mask” channel is lost.

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