This is what you wrote earlier
suemack said:
suemack said:
but selecting the background/forground colour was where I started to lose it.
Sue, if you don't understand something you should have asked. You would have gotten an answer from me or anyone else in a reasonable short time
Don't be afraid to ask either, people love to help others on this board.
That's the best way to learn and not to continue experiments, because you obviously got stuck, otherwise you wouldn't have posted your question.
It's
really (!) important that you learn how to use masks.
Layers and masks are probably the most important tools of Photoshop.
You didn't know how to select black/white background/foreground?
Click on (1), then select a brush (2) and switch colors when needed by clicking on (3) or pressing
X
The reason why it's so important to use masks is because it helps the user to make adjustments to layers without destroying the original pixels. You can even save a file with masks, come back a year later and still undo the correction you made, something that isn't possible with a history brush, because the history brush is useless once you open the image again, because the history is gone.
I can honestly say that about 95% of my stuff contains masks.
There are also other techniques and tools that help you to make non-destructive adjustments to an image. This is
very important, because it makes working with Photoshop so much easier!
suemack said:
when I painted I got a pale yellow coming through. Not sure where I went wrong there. So.........
.....used the history brush to get the bright yellow of the wasp.
The history brush is a solution for this image, but not the best one. I seldom use the history brush. It might be useful for some people, but there are other approaches that work much better, at least that?s my opinion.
If you did see yellow coming through, well Sue, that's the whole trick! If you paint with black on the mask, then you're hiding pixels of this layer. It's like making a hole in the top layer so that you can see the layer underneath. You close that hole (or make the pixels visible again, whatever you want to call it) by painting with white. You can also use a soft brush with a low opacity to make these corrections with more care. And the beauty of this is that you can adjust these corrections any time, even next year, when ever you feel like it.
Maybe masks might be too confusing for you up till now, but please, do yourself a favor and learn
everything about masks, serious!
The problem is that I didn?t have the original. Normally I would start with the original as background layer, add a hue & saturation adjustment layer on top and use its mask instead. Yes, even Hue & Saturation adjustment layers have masks! You gotta love them!