Simple Masking in Photoshop – The Liquid Chocolate Shots

Masking in Photoshop is what the software was built for, and yet so many Photoshop users are unfamiliar or just downright confused by the concept that they never use the technique.

Mask mastery will transform the way you work with Photoshop!

Take these shots for instance:

Milk and Liquid Chocolate Splash

Liquid Milk and White Chocolate splash together in an abstract isolated on white background

Wanting a shot to look like liquid chocolate and cream on a black or white background is all well and good, but producing it can be either as simple or hard as you care to make it.

Trying to get a pure white background ‘in camera’ is problematic to say the least, and chucking hot melted chocolate around if fraught with its own set of problems!

Shooting on a dark or black background is easier because it demands LESS lighting.

Masking in Photoshop will allow us to isolate the subject and switch out the background.

Now for the ‘chocolate bit’ – we could substitute it with brown emulsion paint – but have you seen the bloody price of it?!

Cheap trade white emulsion comes by the gallon at less than the price of a litre of the right coloured paint; and masking in Photoshop + a flat colour layer with a clipping mask put in the right blend mode will turn white paint into liquid chocolate every time!

A tweak with the Greg Benz Lumenzia plugin will finish the shot in Photoshop:

SSChoc A final tweak in Lightroom and the whole process takes from the RAW shot on the left to the finished image on the right.

The key to a good mask in Photoshop is ALWAYS good, accurate pixel selection, and you’d be surprised just how simple it is.

Watch the video on my YouTube channel; I use the Colour Range tool to make a simple selection of the background, and a quick adjustment of the mask edge Smart Radius and Edge Contrast in order to obtain the perfect Photoshop mask for the job:

Like everything else in digital photography, when you know what you can do in post processing, it changes the way you shoot – hence I know I can make the shot with white paint on a black background!

Useful Links:

Greg B’s Lumenzia Plugin for Photoshop – get it HERE – you can’t afford NOT to have it in your arsenal of Photoshop tools.

UPDATE June 2018: Greg Benz (the plugin author) has launched a comprehensive Lumenzia training course – see my post here for more information.

Masking in Photoshop – you mustn’t let the concept frighten or intimidate you! It’s critical that you understand it if you want to get the very best from your images; and it’s a vast subject simply because there are many types of mask, and even more ways by which to go about producing them.

It’s a topic that no one ever stops learning about – nope, not even yours truly! But in order to explore it to the full you need to understand all the basic concepts AND how to cut through all the bullshit that pervades the internet about it – stick with me on this folks and hang on for the ride!

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Save for Web in Photoshop CC – where the Chuff has it gone?

“Who’s moved my freakin’ cheese?”

Adobe have moved it……..

For years Photoshop has always offered the same ‘Save for Web’ or ‘Save for Web & Devices’ option and dialogue box:

save for web,Photoshop CC 2015,colour management,save for web and devices,export,quick export as JPG,export as,export prferences,Andy Astbury,Wildlife in Pixels,Adobe,

The traditional route to the ‘Save for Web’ dialogue in all versions of Photoshop prior to CC 2015.

But Adobe have embarked on a cheese-moving exercise with CC 2015 and moved ‘save for web’ out of the traditional navigation pathway:

Adobe have ‘moved your cheese’ to here, though the dialogue and options are the same.

If we take a closer look at that new pathway:

save for web,Photoshop CC 2015,colour management,save for web and devices,export,quick export as JPG,export as,export prferences,Andy Astbury,Wildlife in Pixels,Adobe

…we see that wonderful Adobe term ‘Legacy’ – which secretly means crap, shite, old fashioned, out dated, sub standard and scheduled for abandonment and/or termination.

‘THEY’ don’t want you to use it!

I have no idea why they have done this, though there are plenty of excuses being posted by Adobe on the net. But what is interesting is this page HERE and more to the point this small ‘after thought’:

save for web,Photoshop CC 2015,colour management,save for web and devices,export,quick export as JPG,export as,export prferences,Andy Astbury,Wildlife in Pixels,Adobe

That sounds really clever – especially the bit about ‘may be’……. let’s chuck colour management out the freakin’ window and be done!

So if we don’t use the ‘legacy’ option of save for web, let’s see what happens. Here’s our image, in the ProPhotoRGB colour space open in Photoshop CC 2015:

So let’s try the Export>Quick Export as JPG option and bring the result back into Photoshop:

Straight away we can see that the jpg is NOT tagged with a colour space, but it looks fine inside the Photoshop CC 2105 work space:

“Perfect” – yay!…………NOT!

Let’s open in with an internet browser……

Whoopsy – doopsy…! Looks like a severe colour management problem is happening somewhere……..but Adobe did tell us:

Might the Export Preferences help us:

In a word……..NO

Let’s try Export>Export As:

Oh Hell No!

If we open the original image in Photoshop CC 2015 in the ProPhotoRGB colour space and then go Edit>Convert to Profile and select sRGB; then select Export>Quick Export as JPG, the resulting image will look fine in a browser. But it will still be ‘untagged’ with any colour space – which is never a good idea.

And if you’ve captioned and key worded the image then all that hard work is lost too.

So if you must make your web jpeg images via Photoshop you will only achieve a quick and accurate work flow by using the Save for Web (Legacy) option. That way you’ll have a correctly ‘tagged’ and converted image complete with all your IPTC key words, caption and title.

Of course you could adopt the same work flow as me, and always export as jpeg out of Lightroom; thus avoiding this mess entirely.

I seriously don’t know what the devil Adobe are thinking of here, and doubtless there is or will be a work around for the problem, but whatever it is it’ll be more work for the photographer.

Adobe – if it ain’t broke then don’t fix it !!

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