Paintbrush and Other Masking Quirks

[jfoster]

When painting a mask with the paintbrush, the loci of points, shown during a stroke, changes slightly when the mouse button is released. Compare the two screenshots. The first is the representation of a paintbrush stroke prior to releasing the mouse. The second is the stroke representation after the mouse button is released.

MaskPaintChange1.jpg (28.81 KiB) Viewed 2611 times

MaskPaintChange1.jpg (28.81 KiB) Viewed 2611 times

Also, the Undo behavior has some issues. If you change tools, in the mask edit mode, and then change settings within that tool, the Undo function doesn't undo the change in the tool, but instead rolls back to the previous tool.

Lastly, my usual procedure in PWP 7, with regard to masking, is to paint a perimeter of a subject and then, using a mask on that mask, floodfill the mask to fill in that mask. Is there an easy way to fill a mask outline in PWP 8? Due to inexperience, I saved the mask off as a file in punted to PWP 7 to finish the image.

Thanks,

Jeff

[jsachs]

The mask displayed while you are painting is an approximation of the final mask which is computed when you release the mouse button. Given the difference in internals, it needs to work differently from PWP 7. Similarly with the Paint, Clone and Smudge transformations. Possibly I will develop a way to improve this in future versions.

The granularity of Mask Undo is at the mask operation level, not for every settings change. If you re-select the tool after undoing it, its previous settings are restored.

If you want to fill the interior of an area of a mask you have painted around, you probably need to save the mask as an image file (via the Mask Settings menu) and then reopen it as an image and flood fill the interior using Blend or Composite to paint white where the mask is. Finally, you can select this mask image into another transformation. Since this is rather awkward, maybe it would be better to use the freehand outline (or polygon or spline) tool to roughly fill the interior of the region and then use the mask paint tool to refine the edge. Most masks are soft-edged, so you may be able to replace the paint operation with a blur instead.

[jfoster]

Thanks.

Another usual PWP 7 step for me when prepping an image for posting online is to resize both the image and masks (for selective sharpening tweaks usually). Is there a convenient way to resize masks to reuse on a resized image in PWP 8?

Jeff

[jsachs]

I'm not sure why you would want to re-mask a resized image, but if I were going to do this I would clone the entire branch and add Resize at the end. Then you can tweak the masks without resizing them and only affect the resized version. Or you could add transformations after the Resize to tweak the final result, but you would have to start over creating the masks.

If you really need to resize the mask you would have to save the mask as an image file, open it and resize it.

The masking tools do attempt to deal with input images of different sizes by scaling all the coordinates, but other settings such as brush and blur radius are not scaled. Also flood fill is sensitive to resolution as parts of the image might fill or not fill depending of how much they are resized. So, depending on the tools you use and the degree of resizing, running the resized image through the same set of transformations might work OK.