No matter what you are cutting out, quickmask is a slow, but precise method for doing so, and a popular way to work.In this example, I'm using a picture of a frog that I already tried cutting out with the extract tool (as explained in my first tutorial). Most of it was fine, but I'm missing some fingertips. In this tutorial, I'm going to show you how to recover the missing information using quickmask. I can also use that tool to cut out the whole image, but personally I try to leave it to the extract tool to do most of the dirty work.
In my layers palette I can see both the original image (background) and the extracted one - background copy 3. I'm going to highlight that one so it is active.
Now - here's a useful little tool. Go to the select menu and click on load selection. This will automatically choose your extracted frog.
Now it's time to enter quickmask mode. At the bottom of your tools, just under the color selector is a button that looks like a rectangle with a circle in it. You need to press that.
When press this the 'dancing ants' will disappear and all the parts you didn't cut out will appear PINK.
You'll notice exactly the pieces that weren't able to cut out in the first place - those missing fingertips as a darker pink. If we want to get those fingertips back, we are going to have to 'erase' that pink area to tell the program that we actually want those pieces.You'll notice too that when we entered quickmask, any colors you might have chosen from before have changed to black and white. That's because when we paint with white the pink disappears. When you paint with black the pink appears
The power of this tool is how you are able to control the edges. Softer brushes - softer edges. Hard brush, hard edge. Different opacities make a different too. The possibilities are endless as to what you want to do. In this case, a hard brush will do just fine.
Now click the quickmask button again. The pink will disappear and the dancing ants are back - but this time they are in the shape of the full frog, fingertips and all.Go back to your layers and this time highlight the bottom layer.At the same time I'm going to choose the lasso tool. It really doesn't matter which one. We aren't exactly using it.
What can I do with that? Well when I right click my frog, I can choose layer via copy. This 'cuts out' the full frog and makes a new layer out of it.
Ta-da! We now have a new layer with the full frog cut out