Tutorial: Easier Masking with color channels

If you have ever tried to use the magic wand tool on shag carpet, or a busy background, you know it can be difficult. There are various selection tools that can help, but sometimes the key is to reduce the complexity.

Upping the contrast can help at times. But it doesn't always do the trick. Another option is to pull up the color channels. Images in RGB mode for instance have three channels that make up the total image....red, green and blue. If you work in one color channel at a time the image often gets simpler.

Let's take this image as an example.

The various sky tones can make it difficult to get a clean mask on this image. However, when we select different color channels we see that most of the different shades dissapear.

I generally make a copy of the original image in the new layer so you don't mess it up.

Then call up color channels and select them one at a time to see which one gives the best view of the image. In this case it is the blue channel.

You can up the contrast too and get a really nice mask.

Then just keep the mask, delete the first layer, and keep the duplicate, complete with mask!

lol this will save alot of time :P