Arizona Autumn - Look what you can do with masks!

[mhwarner]

I finally took some time to play with the demos generously posted by Lin and Andreas so that I could learn how to work with masks. The result of my learning is a short slideshow using various mask techniques to display the beauty of autumn in Northern Arizona.

http://www.mhwarner.com/azautumn.zip

I would be interested to know how it looks on smaller monitors as mine is a 19" with 1920x1200 resolution. Most of the slides were set at 1600 px width so there are black bands both side and top. I used masks to constrain the one slide with a large zoom/pan and also the last one and got them pretty close so that there is only a little perceptible change between slides.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy it.

[JPD]

I finally took some time to play with the demos generously posted by Lin and Andreas so that I could learn how to work with masks. The result of my learning is a short slideshow using various mask techniques to display the beauty of autumn in Northern Arizona.

http://www.mhwarner.com/azautumn.zip

I would be interested to know how it looks on smaller monitors as mine is a 19" with 1920x1200 resolution. Most of the slides were set at 1600 px width so there are black bands both side and top. I used masks to constrain the one slide with a large zoom/pan and also the last one and got them pretty close so that there is only a little perceptible change between slides.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy it.

Nice photos, but I think it's also possible to do the same thing with V5.5, but with PNG when you used JPG and mask with 5.6.

[Lin Evans]

Hi Mary,

Beautiful photos and innovative ways of using masks. I love the images within the leaves. Of course, as JPD says, some of it would be "possible" to do with PNG objects as well, but so much "easier" to do with layer masking and one doesn't need to spend the time manipulating the images to get specialized PNG objects. Rather use existing jpg's and one or two re-usable masks which can be manipulated in innovative ways to achieve myriad different effects. Great music as well!

I've found that some of the ways I've used masks can also be done with manipulating PNG objects as well, but it's so much easier to experiment by positioning the jpg within the mask to get just the desired effect that I probably will always choose the layer mask when I have a choice.

Best regards,

Lin

[mhwarner]

Of course, as JPD says, some of it would be "possible" to do with PNG objects as well, but so much "easier" to do with layer masking and one doesn't need to spend the time manipulating the images to get specialized PNG objects.

Once I got into it, the masks were so easy. All I did was some quick batch resizing of the images and I could manipulate them to my heart's content inside the O&A editor to get exactly the right look. I must have hundreds of masks saved up and I recently discovered in another program how easy it is to create more exotic ones (like state maps, for instance) using dingbat fonts. The other thing I really liked was the ability to easily constrain a large pan/zoom photo inside a mask to eliminate the need for 4 black rectangles or a "picture-frame" logo technique to keep the zoom in the same borders as the other photos. The mask method saves a lot of back and forth in Photoshop to get exactly the right transparency in a picture. You can just squeeze or stretch the mask and move the photo around in side it.

Anyway, thanks to both of you for the comments. Now I have to drag myself back to my "real" work for a while when I would far rather be playing with PTE!