- Obtain the brush tool. We’ll start by using the brush tool in its
normal free-form painting capacity. Make sure your foreground
color is set to white (and press the D key to restore the default
colors if it isn’t). Then press the B key to choose the brush tool.
Right-click in the image window and set the brush Size to 60
and the Hardness to 100 percent. - Paint in the model’s face with white. First, we need to fill in her
face, which will require more patience than finesse. Zoom into
the unwanted dark areas of her face and neck, and then care-
fully paint over them with white, closely tracing the edges as
you get close to the hair. You can think of this as the paint-by-
numbers phase of the endeavor. When you’re done, the image
should look something close to Figure 10-39.
Remember that you can click and then Shift-click with the brush to
create straight lines, which can help you quickly navigate edges.- Change the brush mode to Overlay. Next, we’re going to ap-
proach darkening the background. For this we’ll need a brush
with a little more subtlety. Start by setting the Mode to Over-
lay in the options bar. Leave the Opacity at 100 percent. Then
press the key nine times to increase the brush size to 250
pixels. Finally, click the to the right of the size value in the
options bar, and set the Hardness to 0 percent, as shown in
Figure 10-40 on the next page.
Figure 10-39.Finessing a Mask with Overlay Brushing 365