Using Masks to Get Rid of Unwanted Sharpness

Now that you have created a Layer Mask on the Duplicate copy of your image, you can begin to hide all unwanted sharpened areas within your image.

The main idea to keep in mind when working with a White (Reveal All) Layer Mask, is that if you paint onto the Mask using Black paint, it will hide the sharpening by making parts of your Duplicate Image disappear, which will reveal your original unsharpened image that is located below it in the Layers Palette, as a Background image.

The rule of thumb is this: On a white 'Reveal All' Layer Mask, painting with black paint hides areas of the layer, revealing the layer underneath. Conversely, on a black 'Hide All' Layer Mask, painting with white paint on a layer reveals parts of that layer that are completely hidden by the black layer mask. Once you begin experimenting with it, you will see the concept is absolutely simple.

Once you have ensured that the Mask is selected, you may begin painting with black onto the Mask to hide unwanted areas of the sharpened Duplicate image. If you accidentally paint over an area that you wish to keep sharpened, it can easily be corrected by changing your paint color to white, which will again reveal that portion of your image that you would like to remain sharpened.

• The shortcut to quickly return the Color Palette to the default colors of Black and white is to press D on your keyboard
  
• The shortcut command to alternate from black to white is to press X on your keyboard.

Again I emphasize that nothing you do on a Mask is permanent. You can continue to change your mind, just by changing your paint color from black to white. It is the graphic person's dream tool, allowing you to tweak tweak tweak your image until the sun rises and you realize that you've had no sleep and it's time to go to work (Yikes, also the curse of the graphics person)

Once you are satisfied with your work, you can save your image to any format, ideally Tif is more suited for images that will be printed and you will likely prefer to save to jpeg any images that are destined for Web, because of the much smaller file size.

Important To Understand About Jpeg Images:

It is very important to be aware that jpeg images are compressed. Each time you make changes to a jpeg image and resave it as a jpeg, you are again recompressing it, which will diminish its quality to a certain degree. I therefore recommend that if you are like me and might want to make further changes to you image in the future, save a version of your project in the Photoshop (.psd) format (which will save all your layers, including Masks) or else save in the Tif format yes, I know these two formats create enormous files on your hard drive, but they are uncompressed and therefore if you reopen them, make further changes to your image, then resave them, they will not result in recompression.

So that sums up the process of using Selective Sharpening and Layer Masking. I hope you have found this tutorial helpful.

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