The Power of Masks

Using the Selected Image

Now you have a nice, masked image with nowhere to go. Let's send Meagan to Hawaii to see how our mask looks there.

Open the image you want to move the masked image to (in this case the picture of a Hawaiian beach). Make sure both windows are partially visible. Move the masked image onto the Hawaii image by dragging it with the Move Tool.

In this case, the 300 dpi masked image covers the whole 72 dpi Hawaii image and then some. Make it smaller by pressing command-T (Edit>Free Transform), a bounding box appears. Pulling on the handles distorts the image just like the Crop Tool. To get a proportional scale down of the image, press the shift key while dragging one of the corner boxes toward the center. When the desired size is reached hit Return to commit the changes.

Readjusting the Mask

After you move your image you may notice background fringes that weren't so obvious on a different background. You can make local adjustments without ruining the parts that look good by selecting the fringed areas with the Lasso Tool and applying the Levels Adjustment trick again. This time, however, leave out the initial Gaussian Blur. Also, make sure you are in the Layer Mask mode before you use Levels Adjustment or you will adjust the image and not the mask.