First Look: Inside Photoshop CS3
Posted 03/25/2007 at 1:43pm
| by David Biedny
Filters with Brains (continued)
Add a layer mask. Holding down the Option key, click the thumbnail for the Smart Filter mask, and you'll see the active document display change - instead of the image, you'll see solid white. Select all (Command-A) and invert the mask (Command-I). Now it's all black. Make a selection with any of the selection tools and, making sure the current foreground color is white, fill the selection with white by pressing Option-Delete. Now Option-click the thumbnail of the Smart Filter layer mask in the Layers palette, and you'll see the combination of filter effects only appear in the part of the image that falls inside of the white region of the layer mask. Only the portion of the image under the white part of the layer mask is now processed.

Smart Filters applied through a layer mask put the effects right where you want them. Here we masked and applied filters to a small area of the bee’s eye. The white dot in the black rectangle next to “Smart Filters,” above, indicates which part of the image has been modified.
Next: Filters with Brains (continued)