Masking transparent items – 1

In the next example I’ll show you how easy it is to mask a picture that contains transparent items such as water.

We do this with the Keep and Drop eyedropper tools.
What we need to do is to determine what is transparent and what is not transparent.
We select the transparent colors with the “Drop Eyedropper” tool, and the colors we want to keep with the “Keep eyedropper” tool.
Then we zoom in with the zoom tool, so that we can get a clear idea of our picture.
We select the “Keep Eyedropper” tool and click all the colors that appear in the bottle.
When you press the “CAPS LOCK” on your keyboard, the cursor appears as a circle and not as a pipette (evedropper), which, is easier to work for me.
But, you can do what you want of course. If you work better with a pipette as a mouse, leave it as it is.

Then we zoom in on the water, and select the colors of the water. Or rather, the colors that reflect the display of the water.

Select all the colors of the water, with the exception of the white.

White is the not the color of water, water is transparent. And because of its transparency you see the background.

Eventually you can make this a separate set. This is useful if these colors are removed later by clicking and dragging on theimage with the “Magic Brush Tool”.

Then select the color to be removed with the “Drop Eyedropper” tool.
In this case white.

Then select the “Magic Brush Tool” and set the above options.

Do whatever you want with the “Brush Size”, “Brush Edge”, “Transition” and “Threshold”, these are different for each image, but make sure that the “Use color decontamintion” checkbox is selected.

Then click and drag over the photo.

As you notice the white areas will be removed.

We will continue in the next lesson.

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