Photoshop Quick Mask Tutorial – The Most Really Simple Guide

Using the Photoshop Quick Mask Tutorial will help you to better visualize your selection. Easily add or remove selected areas with the brush tool to refine your selections. Use any method to make your selection but use the Photoshop Quick Mask tool to refine it.

Photoshop Quick Mask Tutorial

One of the most overlooked features is the Photoshop Quick Mask tool. You can use the Photoshop Quick Mask mode to create and edit selections quickly. Start with the selection and then add to or subtract from it to make the mask. You can also create the mask entirely in Quick Mask mode. The color differentiates the protected and unprotected areas.

I’m going to start with an initial selection and create a new layer and I’m going to use the select subject button up here at the top of the menu bar. Photoshop does a pretty good job of selecting everything the camera, the strap, but sometimes it’s hard to see all of the selection. It’s hard to visualize it. You see the marching ants, but sometimes it’s hard to see in detail where it’s actually selecting.

So the quick mask mode is accessed down here on the bottom left of your toolbar and you can click in the middle of the circle and the circle is filled in, and that means you’re in the quick mask mode. Going to click off there to turn off Quick Mask mode and you can also press down on the Q key on your keyboard.

How to Use Photoshop Quick Mask Options

Let’s look at some of the quick mask options. So if you double click on your quick mask mode icon here, here the quick mask options. It says color indicates and if I click on mask areas and say OK. This shows you that these selected areas are white or you can see the camera completely in the mask area. In this case is red and that is something that you can change yourself. If I double click on this again and click on the options selected areas.

The selected area is going to use this red color, so if I say OK, and hit Q on the keyboard. Now it’s showing me that my selected area is the color red and the mask. area outside of it is white. And you can change this color and the opacity. Sometimes you might want to change this color if it makes the selection look easier.

So if you click on it you can use the color picker and change the color and say OK. Most times I use red and the opacity at 50%, so both color and opacity settings affect only the appearance of the mask and have no effect on how to underline areas are protected. So changing these settings make them ask more easily visible against the colors in the image. We leave the options at selected areas. The color red and the opacity at 50% and say OK.

You can toggle between the mask areas and the selected areas options for quick Mask by holding down your alt or option key and clicking on the Quick Mask Mode button. There’s our mask area option and here’s our selected area option. Let’s go with the selected area option back to our selection we made with the select Subject tool.

How to Use the Photoshop Quick Mask Tool

I’m going to zoom in here and just for a second get out of Quick Mask mode. And using the quick mask mode in this scenario is very helpful because here Photoshop made a very good selection, but back here on the edges there is an area where it missed because there isn’t much contrast between the camera and the background. Same over here. Area of this cap. And here on the top of this mode, switch on this camera. And yes, you can use other tools like the pen tool, but if you don’t want to use that and you just want to quickly select something, this is way to go.

So again I’ll go into quick Mask mode by hitting the Q key and I’m going to use my brush B for the brush tool. I’m going to make my brush small zoom in and keep my hardness around 50%. Make it a little bit smaller. Over here my color Swatch. As black as being my foreground color, and I’m going to paint this area in an as you can see, I’m going over that area and if I hit the Q key again you can see that my selection has been updated.

Same thing over in this area. here you can see at the top of this camera. Very faintly, there’s more to the camera that did not get selected, so again, Q for the quick mode, and I’m just painting in the areas that it did not select and I could put my brush at one point, hold down the shift key, and get a straighter line.

And same for down here you can see where it missed press down to Q key. You can see where my selection has been updated. Again, I have a soft brush and I’m just painting in the areas where I can fine-tune my selection. Because the quick mask mode allows you to get in there and really refine your selection. As I said, you can use the pen tool for all this, but if you don’t like using it, this is a good alternative too.

Now in here, maybe it got too much. I can hit X to change my paint color and paint in white right here ’cause I don’t want that selected with the Q key again. and see it updated my selection. Now that I refine my selection, hit Q again, I’m out of the quick mask mode, I can hit my add new layer mask icon and I created my layer mask.

How to Make a Selection Using Quick Mask Mode

You can of course use the quick mask mode to actually make the selection. In other words, you can use this without using one of these selection tools in Photoshop. Let me show you that. So make sure that your default colors of the color Swatch down here. Is black and white. You can hit a D to set the default colors to black and white and hit X to toggle your color swatch.

So now if I hit Q, notice my layer in the layers panel, is red. That means I’m in quick mask mode and I’m going to use my brush tool and I’m going to select black as my foreground color and just paint over this cap. And I’m going to make this go faster and I’m painting he ran. The red is selecting all the areas of the cap and I’m going to go through this quickly. And if I press Q again. you see that it is selected. So you can use the quick mask mode. Without actually using a selection tool.

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See the previous blog article here ▶️ https://charlescabrera.com/photoshop-brush-tool-basic-tips-and-tricks/