What to do with the sky

[albatrosss]

Edgework,

You said:

"Try this: Duplicate your background layer and place it directly above your masked foreground layer." Name it "Defringe"

Having trouble since its possible my reading comprehension is failing but could you re explain what you mean by "your (mine) masked foreground layer."

I tried your method but obviously I am doing something incorrectly. I could let this slide but your technique seem interesting and I don't think that I have ever come across it previously. I would appreciate another attempt by you to get this information across to me.

Thanks.

[albatrosss]

Swampy,

Forgot about your tutorial and when I tried it nothing could be easier. I have used this tutorial before on other images. As a matter of fact I have parts and pieces of your tutorial in my notebook. If I don't have a easy reference hard copy I'll forget I ever used it.

Thanks again for all your efforts.

George

[edgework]

Originally Posted by albatrosss

Edgework,

You said:

"Try this: Duplicate your background layer and place it directly above your masked foreground layer." Name it "Defringe"

Having trouble since its possible my reading comprehension is failing but could you re explain what you mean by "your (mine) masked foreground layer."

I tried your method but obviously I am doing something incorrectly. I could let this slide but your technique seem interesting and I don't think that I have ever come across it previously. I would appreciate another attempt by you to get this information across to me.

Thanks.

You have the trees and cliff masked out (I assume) in order that you can drop the sky behind it. The mask isn't tucking in to the edges of the trees tightly enough, giving you a fringe from the previous (lighter sky).

If instead you masked out your sky to fit it to the contours of your trees etc, no problem. Just invert the mask, apply it to your base layer and drop the (unmasked) sky layer behind it. The steps should work.

The idea is that you darken the lighter fringe with multiplied pixels from your new background, painting carefully so that your darkening effect is restricted only to those areas that need it.

It works the same way if the original background is darker than the new background. In that case, you just set the second background layer to screen, instead of multiply, to remove any dark fringe. This works well with hair in particular, since the most troublesome strands are kind of semitransparent and we expect them to take on the colors of the background.

[albatrosss]

Fastest reply I ever got from anyone anywhere.

Will give it a try. It seems perfectly clear to my now.

Thanks again.

[Regez]

Thanks Lurch and Swampy. I was wondering how to save the files. Now on to my watercolors. Thats where I really need help.

Thanks again to everyone.

[pixel_monkey]

Originally Posted by Swampy

Too add one more item to Lurch's check list. There is a fly out menu in the upper right corner of the Save for Web preview window. Pop that out and select "Use Document Color Profile". This will help retain the actual colors of the image.

If you're only saving for the web and not for printing, and the color profile of the image is already the same as your working profile in Photoshop, I'd suggest not to include the color profile and save the image as untagged. It makes sense to include a color profile to the image if the target audiences are PC users browsing with Firefox or IE, but color profiles aren't handled the same way in Safari on a Mac. What lookss good in Firefox or IE may not appear the same in Safari and vice versa. Getting rid of the color profile keeps the image consistent in all browsers and also keeps the file size a bit smaller. Just a suggestion.