masks vs paths

[maryjane]

Hello all, this is my very first post. Please go easy on me.

Having worked for many years making a path for nearly 90% of the images I've worked on, I have since converted that method to creating a precise mask. I really prefer making a mask vs a precise path due to the control of edge I have with making a mask.

Recently on a job at an ad agency I was told that they use paths, old school thinking in my opinion, for all silo'd images because of the use of the image in InDesign for layout purposes.

I am familiar with InDesign, but not quite schooled with its layering options, if any.

Now, for my question to you all in pre-press or production, or any retouchers in the know, would you keep/apply a clipping path to an image to be used in InDesign that may go over a color or text, or do you keep with your mask and save the file so it will indeed work in InDesign over the text/color?

Looking forward to any and all responses.

Cheers
MJ

[Cuervo79]

Um masks and paths are two different things, why would you think a path is an "old school" way of doing stuff? you can always convert a path to a selection and make a mask out of it. There are some things you can do in masks (like luminosity masks) that you can't do in paths. Each tool for what it's needed... In your example the client rules. If the client wants me to work in an "old school" way because he actually needs that for another purpose then I do what the client asks and fulfill that need.

[maryjane]

hey thanks. In my opinion and experience, with making a path then selecting that path and setting a feather, you are not always going to have a precise mask, in the case of depth of field.

If I followed every request a client ever gave me I would have never gotten to where I am. I believe in options, especially when it comes to PS. There are certainly more than one way to get from point A to point B.

My question was more about InDesign restrictions/treatments for image placement than it was about the actual creating a path/mask.

After working in NYC for over 15 years as a retoucher, I moved to Sydney, Australia and worked alongside some very good retouchers. They were all of the mask making school vs. making a path. They all agreed it was not as precise as a mask is. I then had to create masks for every silo I made. I began to realize how much easier and organic it was in comparison to making a path. I didn't just work with 1 company in my 2 years in Australia and they all expected me to use the mask making method.

[pixelzombie]

that is old school, those designers are so used to working in quark they don't realize that indesign can handle psd files very easily

[maryjane]

Oh thank you, pixelzombie. I knew I wasn't crazy. I know some places/designers/retouchers can get caught in the whole 'we've used this workflow for years and we like it' thing. But I knew that the software has expanded as it had to. I'm actually tryin to put together a presentation for 'the client' who is a very good friend of mine and fellow retoucher. She runs a retouching studio within a very well known Ad Agency and she was hard headed about a path vs my mask with respect to InDesign.

We have to share our knowledge with our peers, especially when chances are we may be working side by side.

Thanks again, pixelzombie

[Cuervo79]

Originally Posted by maryjane

hey thanks. In my opinion and experience, with making a path then selecting that path and setting a feather, you are not always going to have a precise mask, in the case of depth of field.

If I followed every request a client ever gave me I would have never gotten to where I am. I believe in options, especially when it comes to PS. There are certainly more than one way to get from point A to point B.

My question was more about InDesign restrictions/treatments for image placement than it was about the actual creating a path/mask.

After working in NYC for over 15 years as a retoucher, I moved to Sydney, Australia and worked alongside some very good retouchers. They were all of the mask making school vs. making a path. They all agreed it was not as precise as a mask is. I then had to create masks for every silo I made. I began to realize how much easier and organic it was in comparison to making a path. I didn't just work with 1 company in my 2 years in Australia and they all expected me to use the mask making method.

Then I don't see why you're undecided on what to do since you say you have allot of experience with this.

[maryjane]

Cuervo79, have I upset you or something? Thank you for your interest and support in my very first post here on RetouchPro. I appreciate all the input I can get from my peers and beyond.

Again, I was mainly concerned with how InDesign treats masked files and files with a clipping path. There are certainly images that one can 'get away with' making a clipping path. But if my client and myself are looking to create a final product that is as close to the real thing as we can keep it without losing the integrity of the original image/photo then I would prefer to do that.

Since I do not work with InDesign, I was hoping that they had made changes where a designer could use a layered file that has been masked rather than its hard, often clumsy, clipping path. I have, since starting this blog, created a sample of this using InDesign and 2 psd files and forwarded them on to my friend/client for her review in hopes of sharing with her a new option for her and her retouching team.

Again, thank you for your kind support.

Cheers
MJ

[crazyfly1]

Welcome to Retouchpro MJ.
I can't help with your question as I do very little in InDesign, I just wanted to take a sec and say Hi.
Now I gotta run, I just got up and havn't had coffee yet. I get grumpy without my coffee ya know.

[maryjane]

nice to meet you Crazyfly1.

[SilvaFox]

Hey MJ. Welcome.

InDesign can do nearly everything and anything that PS can, as far as image placement. Many designers are used to, and familiar with, placing an image with a clipping path. They may not even know they can place images with regular paths or layers. They can set layers to "multiply" so they can overprint shadows, etc.

Problems always seem to arise when you try to "sell" anything new to somebody who's going to have to spend additional time to place something more than ONCE, whether it will look better or not.

Cheers!

[robmac]

Hello, my first post too! In indesign you could pull in an image that had been masked and had background deleted, but being given a clipping path would leave more options as to having parts of the subject busting out of a frame.

[SilvaFox]

Originally Posted by Cuervo79

you can always convert a path to a selection and make a mask out of it.

So YOU'RE the guy who does this. Ah ha!

[SilvaFox]

Originally Posted by robmac

Hello, my first post too! In indesign you could pull in an image that had been masked and had background deleted, but being given a clipping path would leave more options as to having parts of the subject busting out of a frame.

Could be a layer labeled "soft head silo", or "elbow pop out".

[robmac]

oh yeah, true.

[Cuervo79]

lol, right....

[DJSoulglo]

Just make a layered PSD, in inDesign you can import the same image as different layers/layer comps and do all sorts of fun stuff. Clipping masks are very Quark.

[edgework]

For precise shapes with clean curves, paths beat masks for precision. But for anything with Depth of Field, like most photographs, where edges move in and out of focus, paths are useless.

As for understanding In Design, I'm still beating my head against the wall trying to teach the mechanical folks at my agency that they can import layers separately, set the shadows to multiply in In Design, and, no, I don't need to make ten different comps in Photoshop. Old habits die hard. The ghost of Quark lives on.

[_jason_]

I want to point out, that the Photoshop way of paths isn't ecactly the most efficient way. Did you ever look at Fireworks (formerly owned by Macromedia, now Adobe too)?

Well that program unfortunately is merely situable for web design graphiic work, but it has a huge advantage regarding PHATS versus bitmaps.

In Fireworks you have a kind of hybride vector / pixelmap solution which is absolutely great and enormously powerful! Paths are rendered in REALTIME to internal pixelmaps and you even can apply usual Photoshop plugins and typical Photoshop layer blendings to it!

Phats are there completely none-destructive and (unlike Photoshop) do not require large file data.

In Photoshop nearly all is rendered to pixelmaps, which actually blows up the file sizes enormously and also often results in definately destructive workflow. It's in other words: inefficiently as hell. I'll call that a misconception!

I whished Adobe would look somehow closer at the Fireworks way and overhaul their entire use (and sense) of paths in Photoshop. I personally regularily drive crazy when using paths in Photoshop.

Even in retouching using paths could be a very efficient way.
For instance I would actually use it to create makeup overlay and "light & shadow" and lighting techniques for skulpting/modeling and many others based on realtime rendered smooth editable vector shapes including all kind of effects, like in Fireworks.

Hell, I rescently even used Fireworks after Photoshop to apply certain changeble and nonedestuctive changes to an image because I was not able to achieve something closely similar in Photoshop !!! ...

Jason

[_jason_]

PS: For webdesign I never even would touch Photoshop at all.
I use Fireworks since the very first version for all web design work. Because it is miles more efficient and powerful than Photoshop for that.

Adobe even designed a clone of that very popular concept developed by Macromedia at that time, but they actually discontinued the way shortly after trying that (Adobe ImageReady was the name if I remenber right). Seemed the same thing as with "Adobe GoLive" as the intented competitor to Macromedia Dreamweaver... A complete disaaaster!

The Macromedia programs were always extraorbitant better and more intuitively to use. Noone could actually beat that!

I was *shocked* when I heared that Macromedia was bought by Adobe, because I feared (and I still fear) they will destroy the intuitivity and smart concepts behind those programs and adopt their incredible baroque Photoshop/Acrobat/InDesign and whatever other interfaces and inefficient concepts to them ... God beware us.

Fortunately, up to now, the contradiction has occured. The Macromedia User interface concepts were adapted to all the Adobe programs. That was a huge step forward, Adobe!


BUT remember: Macromedia Freehand (the state of the art competitor to Adobe Illustrator) was discontinued by Adobe and thus some very smart technologies and concepts killed !!! I fear Macromedia/Adobe Director will be the next...


Thanks Macromedia! You guys are so great!

(That's in fact the only reason why I use Adobe programs today, I was formerly a customer of the *complete* Macromedia product lines ...)

Jason

[SilvaFox]

One minute we were talking about InDesign and the next, my head hurts.

[DJSoulglo]

I btw pretty much always use paths to cut stuff out. Then turn the selection into a quickmask and blur/paint where needed. Don't know why, but I for some reason love the path tool. Anywho, anyone who says that you can't use paths for soft selections is wrong. Feather/refine selection/quickmask gives you a lot of flexability in blurring/softening your mask, yet you still get the nice lines/curves you get with a path.

[shift studio]

Originally Posted by DJSoulglo

I btw pretty much always use paths to cut stuff out. Then turn the selection into a quickmask and blur/paint where needed. Don't know why, but I for some reason love the path tool. Anywho, anyone who says that you can't use paths for soft selections is wrong. Feather/refine selection/quickmask gives you a lot of flexability in blurring/softening your mask, yet you still get the nice lines/curves you get with a path.

I couldn't agree more.

--shift studio.

[eves3]

To solve the dilemma of the agency people being resistant to importing PSDs into InDesign, I did it for them and sent an InDesign Doc and the PSDs for them to copy into their documents. I did this a few times until they were shamed into figuring it out for themselves. This is a method I've used many times over years to drag those kicking and screaming into advances in technology. Action is always more effective than talk!

And I repeat what's been said several times in the thread...Masks and Paths are both useful tools. Their functions overlap a bit, yet they serve a multitude of different functions!

[nycretoucher]

I have been working in PrePress for over 20 years, I use masks. Even back in the Quark days (quark files are pretty rare for the past couple of years) we used to just build the files in photoshop, save as a tif and then import it already assembled into it's background, with the products in the foreground etc. But with InDesign (thankfully Adobe finally got it right, unlike it's failed pagemaker attempt back in the day) I don't even flatten my PSD's anymore, I just bring in the image with Transparent background and assemble everything in InDesign. So much easier that way.

I work with people that use clipping paths as opposed to masks, but when I ask them why they prefer them it seems it's mostly an old school habit used to preserve server space back in the time when gigabytes of storage were thousands of dollars and backups were done on Syquest drives. If the image was too big for the backup disk it had to be compressed and then split into multiple parts. LOL!

Don't get me wrong, if it's just a picture of a TV, or a camera, or some other hard edged product, I will use a clipping path as it's all hard edges anyway and they are fast enough to make, but on fashion and beauty, especially around the hair, it's nearly impossible to get a perfect silo using paths.

[Flashtones]

This is not directed at the OP, but in a general sense. Some people confuse the pen tool with paths, or, exclude the pen tool when talking about masks. But like DJSoulglo, I regularly use the pen tool for making selections that become masks, then adjusting the edges of the masks as necessary with all tools available.

No one should deny themselves the functionality of the pen tool just because they prefer masks over paths. The pen is simply one more tool in making the perfect selections/masks.

[TopiToo]

Hello maryjane,
In reply to your question, most if not all editorial staff using In-design do indeed use paths for text run-around as you know. With regards to paths in Psd/Tiff files , I prefer to use this method I leave the clients path well alone but use it to create an Alpha channel and brush a soft edge. Then dupe the picture box in In-Design (paste into new layer) - import image – check import options – Alpha channel tab – select your image.

Make sure the Clipping path options are set to NONE and text wrap is off, but only for the duped image as the image below may have text run-around. I find working this way you can lock all the clients layers
minimising the chances of text reflow. I hope this helps

[maryjane]

Thank you everyone for contributing to this discussion. I'm still talking about it with fellow creatives outside this forum. I hope that we can all take bits and pieces of what has been mentioned here and test them out. You may be surprised and eve be tempted to start making a shift in your current methods.

There are endless images being created and executed by us and as we surely are aware, each has its unique needs and boundaries. There's the image of a model with wild hair and the image of a cereal box that need to be selected from the background. I still choose to take my time and effort to create a mask my hand/painting it in rather than using a path. I know my skills of masking are precise enough to lift that box without having a jagged edge or looking phony. I have seen many ugly cut out images on magazine covers that make me cringe. But I just have a different opinion of quality than the editor of that magazine. Blah blah blah.

Play, explore, ,masking can take time to master. I've recently watched a decent retoucher used to making paths struggle to create a mask by painting it in. She had to practice her new skill. Patience, if you've got it. If you're a good retoucher, you've got heaps of patience.

Happy deep etching everyone!

[TopiToo]

Hi maryjane

I am sorry I have no idea what your taking about or maybe it's just me?

[Kermy]

i have given up on using images with placed paths in indesign or for the latest quark for that matter. transparent psds is the way forward. you've got way more control over edge sharpness over the total image. as different edges on an image have differing depths of focus and with masking you are able to control this which allows you to get a more realistic cut out...