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Sure can! Once you learn how to do Layer Masks, you generally do tons of them (okay, MB don't actually weigh anything...). Then you notice ever now and then some little shadows, little bits of pixels you thought you had hidden floating around your isolated image like a sad halo. When doing a layer mask with an airbrush, you have to be sure to get 100% of the pixels in and around those hard to isolate crevices and corners. Even a 5% sprinkling of gray will show up against a white background. The surest way is to use a hard brush to make sure you are masking out any and all background elements, then use the softer edged airbrushes to slowly, carefully bring back the edges of faces and features, being careful to use the tiniest brushes to redefine flowing locks of hair.
But who has the time when you've got 17 photos to fix in the next hour?
So, do the best you can and let Photoshop show you where you missed some pixels.
1. Get your photo and layer mask ready.
Here's a patch from the USS Champlain. The client provided it on a white background, but they want the blue of the patch in the background instead.
2. I deleted a bunch of the white with a quick click of the Magic Wand in the white area and hit delete. (This technique will not be goof if there is no solid break, say if there was some white within the patch that touched the background white, the Magic Wand would have selected it too, even with some adjusting of the "Tolerance" levels. Be ready to mask out your photo's background manually)
Then I added a layer mask and went to work with a small brush running carefully around the edges.
3. When I was happy with it I made sure no layer below the patch layer was active. Ta-dah! The checkerboard pattern of the kitchen floor is visible, so I have a pretty good transparent area around the patch.
Or do I?
4. I click on my solid blue, new background (eye-droppered from the patch using the 5x5 sampling to get an overall blue, versus a specific pixel point--the fabric has many blues mixed in, I wanted an average) and behold, some white areas are still there, (for this tutorial I bumped them up to show better, they were quite faint.)
Now I know there are some background pixels left over in my layer masking. Some in the corners. Some floating very near the patch. See them? Just a blur off the wings and around the circle?
5. A few quick hits on the layer mask with a large brush (defaulting back to the black foreground color) rids me of the worst offenders.
6. Now select the patch layer--not the patch layer's mask.
Go to >Layer>Layer Style and chose "Drop Shadow."
7. Now this is just for the purposes of giving errant pixels WAY too much of a shadow. I change the spread to 28% (you may have to experiment with this depending on the resolution of your particular photo) and leave the distance at 5 pixels. This will create a large, ungainly drop shadow pretty close to the actual pixels.
8. Look at that! Even the tiniest remants of pixels now cast large shadows!
Go back to the patch's layer mask:
and start running your airbrush around where those shadows are. You might not see the pixels being masked, but the shadows will disappear as you get rid of the source.
For a trick for using layer modes to help your layer masking click here.
