Exporting Masks from SketchUp Models for Use in Photoshop

15th May 2011 @ 8pm

It’s somewhat peculiar to begin a tutorial for SketchUp with a prolonged discussion of a certain concept in image editing called masking. But without this clarification you might not quite understand why I set up my SketchUp models in a such a very specific manner.

So what are we talking about? Masking was originally a traditional “analog” art technique. Most adults will discover that they are familiar with it, even if they have never used it for anything more elaborate than house-painting: if you cover some part of a wall with “masking tape” and then paint across the surface, on removal of the tape you will find that the area it had covered was (hopefully) protected from the paint subsequently applied to that wall. In the fine arts, including painting, photography, printing, and even ceramics, this basic technique has been refined and elaborated in a thousand specific ways, depending upon the medium and the exact degree of protection of the underlying surface that the artist needs….

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