- Save the mask. Now that you’ve gone to all the trouble to get
the mask to this stage, take my word for it and save the file. You
haven’t really altered anything in the overall composition, but
saving the mask allows you to come back to it later and rethink
it, should you want to. - Load the mask as a selection outline. We finally get to put
the mask we’ve been working on for three exercises to work.
With the Mask channel still selected, click the icon at the
bottom of the Channels panel to load the channel as a selec-
tion (as in Figure 10-43). Then press Ctrl-2 (�-2) to return to
the full RGB image. - Convert the background to a floating layer. To give our model
and her nicely masked hair a new background, we’ll need to
turn her (and it) into a floating layer. Switch back to the Layers
panel, and double-click the Background layer. Name the new
layer “Model” and click OK. - Add layer mask. To turn the current selection into a layer mask,
click the icon at the bottom of the Layers panel. The visual
result is a view of the model masked against the transparency
grid, as dramatically depicted in Figure 10-44.
Figure 10-43.Figure 10-44.368 Lesson 10: Creating and Applying Masks