Now I’m going to use Quick Mask mode to make a selection of Vania’s teeth.
In Quick Mask mode, you can paint with the Brush tool to create a selection.
When you exit Quick Mask mode, your painting is converted to a selection of marching ants. To move into Quick Mask mode, you can either click on the icon at the bottom of your Tools panel or do like I do and just hit the Q key.
If you haven’t done it already, you need to change the Quick Mask options to match the changes we made to the alpha channel options. Double-click on the Quick Mask button at the bottom of the Tools panel to open the Quick Mask Options dialog box. Figure 1.51 shows how I set my options. The most important setting is Color Indicates Selected Areas. The color you choose for your mask and the opacity percentage are personal preferences, but I tend not to use the default red because I am usually working on skin and I prefer a color, like green or blue, that stands in well. Click OK to accept the new settings. The dialog box will close, and you will still be in Quick Mask mode (Figure 1.51).
Once you are in Quick Mask mode, paint on the area you want to select (in this case, the teeth) with black. Your painting will appear onscreen in your designated Quick Mask color—blue in my case. I’m going to use my straight retouching brush (Transfer or in CS4 Other Dynamics turned off) with a Hit the Q key to enter
Figs 1.51, 1.51a Resetting Quick Mask Options.
slightly soft edge (hardness 5 75%) at 100% flow. If you make a mistake, you can paint back over the area with white to erase. I used a softer-edged brush at the gum line and a slightly harder-edged one for the hard line at the bottom of the teeth. Figure 1.52 shows how my Quick Mask looks when I’m done painting and how it looks after I hit the Q key again to exit Quick Mask mode, resulting in a marching ants selection.
Quick Mask is an on-the-fly method of making a selection, so the “mask” we just painted is not saved anywhere. We need to use this selection right away or save it to the Channels panel. I chose to use it right away to CC Vania’s teeth. We will not merge down this correction, so let’s put it in the Skin group.
Open the Skin group and click on the Skin Balance correction we did earlier;
that way the new correction we are about to add will end up just above Skin Balance.
I’m sure I will need more than one move to correct the teeth, so I’m going to create a new group and use my teeth selection to create a layer mask for it.
With the teeth selection still active, click Add New Group and then click the Add Layer Mask icon. Adding the layer mask converted my selection into a mask for the group. Now all my color corrections will be contained in this group, which I will name “Teeth CC.”
First, I added a Curves adjustment layer and pulled down on the master (CMYK channel) curve (output: 43/input: 50) to slightly brighten her teeth. Then I added a Selective Color adjustment layer, pushing the yellow color slider in the yellows all the way to the left and the yellow color slider in the reds to –59.
When you remove yellow from teeth, be careful that they don’t become violet or blue.
After brightening the teeth, something that had attracted my eye before is now even more noticeable, so I decide to quickly address it before moving on.
The very last gum far left is darker than the rest and looks bruised. I see in the Channels panel that it has more cyan than the other gum areas, so I select it
Figs 1.52, 1.52a Painting in teeth with Quick Mask.
on my Mouth Retouching layer and get a Curves adjustment layer. I brighten it very slightly on the master Curve and remove cyan from the cyan channel until it looks more like the other gum (slightly darker, of course, because it’s farther back in the shadows). When I’m done, I merge it down to the mouth retouch layer (Figure 1.53).
We need to hit the hand a bit to bring it up to speed with the rest of the image. I decided to put the hand in a group with a mask on it, and when I loaded my mask from my earlier hand CC, I see that I’ve made a mistake! But these things happen, and it’s a good opportunity to show you how to fix the mistake and what to do instead the next time.
When I open the Skin CC group and load the mask from the hand CC inside, I see that my mask is off-register (Figure 1.54). That’s because I warped the hand a little more after I had already made my mask. This wouldn’t have been Fig 1.53 Selecting bruised gum and after CC merging back to RET layer.
Fig 1.54 Fixed Mask.
a problem if I had saved my mesh in the Liquify Filter and applied it to both the hand and the mask of the hand.
First I’m going to fix the now incorrect hand mask by painting with black and white. I deselected Command/Ctrl 1 D and worked directly on the layer mask.
I can reveal the mask on the hand CC group as a color overlay by clicking on the group in the Layers panel to select it and hitting the backslash (\) key; then hit it again to hide the overlay (Figures 1.54A, B).
I actually want to do a bit more warping to the hand before I retouch.
Her index finger is still a bit too puffy, so I’m going to use the Liquify Filter to warp the finger, save my mesh, and then apply the mesh to my mask so I won’t have the same problem again. Make a Rectangular Marquee selection around the hand and enter the Liquify Filter (Shift 1 Command/Ctrl 1 X). I pushed in a couple of puffy areas very gently, but not too much. I needed to freeze some spots so they would not move as I worked (Figure 1.55). When done, click on the Save Mesh button. Save your mesh to the folder you made earlier on the desktop or wherever you choose to save your meshes. You can give it a unique name if you like, but I often just use the same name to overwrite the mesh over and over. Generally, once I finish using a mesh to update any masks involved in the liquify, I won’t need it again. Click OK to accept the Liquify.
Do not deselect! While you still have the marquee selection active, click on the Hand layer located inside the “Skin” group and then Option/Alt-click on the thumbnail of the mask to see the mask in your image (Figure 1.56).
With the mask on the hand group on-screen, go back into Liquify and click the Load Mesh button. Navigate to the mesh you saved, click on it to select it, and click on Open. This will warp your mask to perfectly match the warps you applied to the hand. Click OK (Figure 1.57).
Figs 1.54a, 1.54B Loaded mask shows that it’s off, showing the mask by using the left slash key.
I clicked on the eyeball of the hand group to make the image visible again and did a little more basic retouching, mostly on the neck and hand. Now I feel ready to start compiling my background. We are not finished retouching Vania, but we have made a decent beauty pass. I still have issues with how her hair looks. I don’t like her hairline, and many other areas look dry and broken.
We have to do quite a bit more color correction and, of course, CC her makeup to match the products! However, we need to put her in her new background before we can do the color correctly. So let’s do some “Comping.”
Figs 1.56, 1.56a Mask visible in the image and the group mask active in the Layers panel.
Figs 1.55, 1.55a The hand in Liquify Filter, saving the mesh.
Fig 1.57 Loading the mesh in Liquify.
Figs 1.58, 1.58a Current retouch state.
Now we are going to build our comp file. First, let’s save our Vania file with a new name to create a new file. Choose File . Save as. . . from the menu bar and rename your file Vania_Spread_v1.tif.
Cropping
Now we need to extend this file rather drastically to the right. I’m going to accomplish that with the Crop tool. I’m going to crop a bit off of Vania’s lower body because I can see from the FPO (For Placement Only) that we have a lot more than we need, and it will help keep the file size down. I’m not going to crop it too close because it’s always a good idea to have plenty of bleed outside of the crop. I don’t know how much extra image I’m going to need to the right, so I’m just going to guess at it for now. Hit the C key to get your Crop tool, and drag it across your file until you have the whole image within the crop lines. Then drag the right crop handle out to the right, estimating how much extra you will need by looking at the FPO compilation. I also pushed the bottom crop line up slightly. Figure 2.0 shows my new cropped file dimensions.