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Dogwaffle
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Dogwaffle
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Blurring
the Selection
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We're now starting from this image and two stored selections. The upper
selection shows just the sky area included, whereas the lower one has
also the mountains and trees nearby, but not the house.
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Select the selection
from the upper mask, i.e. the one containing just the sky region: click
the 'Replace' button on the stored alpha panel.
This will put that stored alpha mask back into the current, active
alpha buffer so we can work with that selection.
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Select Blur alpha.. from the Alpha menu:
Alpha > Blur
alpha...
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Set the desired blur diameter, perhaps around 10-30 or thereabouts.
(hey, it's not a precise science, it's art ;-)
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You can grab the new, blurred alpha back into the stored alpha
placeholder directly: click "Get alpha".
Or you could use Alpha>Store alpha... to grab a new, different
snapshot of the blurred one, so that the original (crisp) one remains
available as stored too.
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Either way, you now will have a stored alpha buffer looking similar to
this, with blurred edges. Clearly, this is a grey scale image. Most of
the stored apha is black (unselected pixels) or white (fully selected
pixels), but along the blurry edges they take on a transitional value
of rey values which shows a progressive amount of selection.
A selection is essentially a per-pixel weight factor from black to
white, or 0 to 255 as an 8-bit value. To quote a friend and expert user
of Photoshop: Selections and masks are exactly the same: the key to
mastering Photoshop is mastering selections. And not surprisingly, it
also helps to master selections and the alpha channel in Project
DOgwaffle, or other imaging and painting tools for that matter.
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Repeat the blurring on the second stored alpha mask too. It's of course
totally voluntary, you don't really have to blur these alpha masks. It
may just help if your selection suffers from some inaccuracies along
tricky profiles, such as trees along the horizon. A blurry transition
there can help simulate the perception of other objects gradually
disappearing through the ticker branches. This will be useful for snow
flakes to not disappear too suddenly as they fall down from the sky and
reach the edge of the selection.
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next
step: creating an animation
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