Problems with masking and deleting inverse area

MC
Posted By
Michelle_Cartwright
Feb 16, 2005
Views
316
Replies
4
Status
Closed
I use the masking tool in Photoshop 7.0 quite often at work. Today is the first time I’ve ever had this problem. Here is what happened:
usually I mask an area, let’s say a stack of shorts, select the inside of the area masked with the wand, choose to modify then expand and then go to edit to fill the area with foreground at 100%. I then exit quick mask which selects the area I masked. If I then select the inverse of the area and rename the layer anything other than background and hit delete, USUALLY the entire background is deleted … except today! when I do all of these and hit delete it deletes the background and a percentage of the non-selected area (stack of shorts) WHY IS IT DOING THAT????? if the area isn’t chosen why is it being affected??? and why is it only deleting a percentage??? am I making sense? in other words instead of just deleting the background it’s making the area I want to stay on the screen (the stack of shorts) seem like it’s at 50% opacity. I double clicked on the masking tool and it’s at 100% and the opacity of my brush is 100% — what did I do?
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area delete inverse mask problems

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DM
dave_milbut
Feb 16, 2005
double click on the quick mask icon in the tool bar. you can choose if the rubylith (sp?) is showing you selected areas or masked areas. masked is the default. personally i prefer selected and always change that as soon as i set up ps on a system.

as for the percentage being masked, it sounds like there’s some sort of feathering going on. check feathering options.
Y
YrbkMgr
Feb 16, 2005
If you are using the magic wand tool, recognize that it selects based on the options in the options bar; but what a lot of people don’t know is that the sample it uses is driven by the eyedropper tool. Whether the eyedropper is set to Point Sample, 3 x 3, or 5 x 5, affects what gets sampled with the magic wand, which in turn drives the number in the options bar.

Whenever I make magic wand selections, I go to the channels palette, and create a new Alpha channel of the selection. Then I inspect the channel to make sure that it’s totally black and white. If it’s not, I clean up the channel – either with levels or the paintbrush or eraser, or various other methods, and then I load the channel as the selection.

It’s a way, for me, to use the magic wand as kind of a "preselection" tool, and letting the saved selection serve as the final selection.

In your case, you may see that what is supposed to be white in the saved selection, might be a shade of gray, thereby causing partial selections of that area.
DM
dave_milbut
Feb 16, 2005
good points t!
MC
Michelle_Cartwright
Feb 16, 2005
Thank you, I messed around with everything you both said and it’s mysteriously working again!!! I appreciate the help, so does my headache!

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