Doug Kerr
Well-known member
Recent events regarding the future of Photoshop have stimulated renewed interest in other image editors.
An important aspect of Photoshop is its elaborate layer structure, and in contemplating other editors, considerable attention is given to their capabilities (if any) in that vein.
Separate from, but in many ways related to, Photoshop's layer facilities is its mask facility. There are three-and-a-half kinds of masks in Photoshop, but one of them is never recognized in the documentation as a mask, another one has a misleading name, and one that is called a mask isn't really a mask at all.
Two year ago, when I had one of my periodic fleeting periods of interest in Photoshop, I decided to find out what that was all really about. When I had finished, mostly recognizing that a month hence I would have no idea what I had determined, I wrote a "little" (21 page) technical article about the matter, "The Secret Life of Masks in Photoshop".
Those of you earnestly looking into just what we have in Photoshop and what we have elsewhere might find it of interest. It is available here:
http://dougkerr.net/Pumpkin/articles/Photoshop_Masks.pdf
Best regards,
Doug
An important aspect of Photoshop is its elaborate layer structure, and in contemplating other editors, considerable attention is given to their capabilities (if any) in that vein.
Separate from, but in many ways related to, Photoshop's layer facilities is its mask facility. There are three-and-a-half kinds of masks in Photoshop, but one of them is never recognized in the documentation as a mask, another one has a misleading name, and one that is called a mask isn't really a mask at all.
Two year ago, when I had one of my periodic fleeting periods of interest in Photoshop, I decided to find out what that was all really about. When I had finished, mostly recognizing that a month hence I would have no idea what I had determined, I wrote a "little" (21 page) technical article about the matter, "The Secret Life of Masks in Photoshop".
Those of you earnestly looking into just what we have in Photoshop and what we have elsewhere might find it of interest. It is available here:
http://dougkerr.net/Pumpkin/articles/Photoshop_Masks.pdf
Best regards,
Doug