Studio and ReMask

Topaz Products
1

I have been trying to use ReMask with Topaz Studio and all of my testing just generates more questions. Here are some.

  1. Why am I able to call ReMask (5) from Studio without a second layer? I can not do this from photoFXLab or from any editor, all of which require that I have a second layer. Yet there is no such requirement in Studio.

  2. If I call ReMask with a second layer it is missing when I return back to Studio. I tried to replace a sky, just to test the functionality, so I selected an image, loaded a second layer using the Image Layer functionality, called ReMask, created the mask, returned back to Studio and the sky was completely gone in the newly created image.

  3. If I create a mask in Studio I get white and black. White refers to those parts of the image which will have any adjustments applied and black for those that will not. If, instead, I call ReMask and mark the sky as Cut and mark the rest of the image as Keep I end up with an image that is black for the sky and white for the ground and that is the exact opposite of what I would have expected, given the color scheme used in Studio. When I return this image back to Studio it looks right - the sky is missing and the ground is visible. I then add a new sky but instead of replacing the missing sky in the returned image I get the sky replacing the ground and no sky. I can make the new sky appear or not appear by clicking background or foreground, but it is not appearing as the sky, but as the ground and there is no sky.

Here is what Studio looks like if the new sky is marked as foreground:

foreground.jpg1500×826 808 KB

And here is what it looks like if the new sky is marked as background:

background.jpg1500×838 911 KB

I can only assume that either I am doing something very wrong or that Studio is not meant to be used with ReMask. Can someone help me here?
Thank you.

1 Like
2

Try adding your skyless foreground as an image layer to your new sky, rather than the other way round. Doing it the other way certainly produces some interesting results - but I’m sure it’s not intended to.

2 Likes
3

Actually I feel a bit foolish for not thinking of that myself. Thank you for pointing it out. Apparently I was just thinking about this backwards as your suggestion works perfectly.

I guess I sometimes get caught up in thinking about how to do things based on my experience with other tools and sometimes that leads me down the wrong path.

Thank you again.

2 Likes
4

You’re welcome. It’s easy to look too hard at something - we’ve all done it,and we’ll all do it again.