Tutorial 6: Mask, Solarize & Gradient Fill

Original Image

When I tried the Color Transform - Solarize filter, I ended up with the desired result for the bridge and the buildings, but the sky turned black -- not what I wanted.

Applying a Color Mask at that stage did not work because I ended up selecting all the black tones in the image, rather than just the black sky.

There are other masking tools available which I could have tried, but I chose a different approach, because using the Color Mask is such a good choice here (the sky is fairly uniform in colour in the original image).

Color Mask

I started again on the original image, this time with Mask - Color Mask to select the sky. The boxes on the dialog panel should be set to Sampled Colors and Marquee. Click on the eye-dropper tool to select the colours in the image.

Once this was done, I selected Mask - Invert Mask which has the effect of masking the sky and leaving the rest of the image open to further manipulation.

Solarize and Fill

As the next step, I applied Color Transform - Solarize at the maximum setting, which changed the colours of the bridge and the buildings to what I wanted.

Then, I selected Mask - Invert Mask again and applied a Fill to the sky -- a simple linear fill of dark purplish blue to light blue (bottom to top).

The Fill button is at the bottom of the screen, next to Paint and Paper. It gives access to four different Fill modes, and the only limits here are set by your imagination!

I chose a linear fill because the foreground is pretty busy, and a textured background would have detracted from it.

The picture could be further improved by getting rid of the towers, but that is a time-consuming task -- perhaps done in another tutorial!