To bring up the channel with your saved selection, simply click its entry in the Channels palette. You can see the 'Bird' channel I created in
figure 20.9
figure 20.9
With your selection channel open, you can examine your work with a more critical eye. When I zoomed-in, for example
(see figure 20.10), I could tell that I had some holes in the mask, or areas that I had missed with the brush tool.
figure 20.10
Fixing those problems is as easy as painting them away with the brush tool. To fix the holes seen in figure 20.10, I simply grabbed the brush and painted them out using white.
Once you're satisfied that the selection is as good as you can get it, save your image. Make sure that you save a copy as a .psd file to retain the channel and your selection. Having done so you can easily get the selection back at any time by choosing Select, Load Selection... In the dialog box that appears, simply choose the document and the channel you want to load the selection from... voila!
Of course, the real magic comes when you apply corrections/filters to the selected area. We'll tackle that in an upcoming tutorial by correcting the exposure of part of a photograph...
In the meantime here's a teaser. The photo below
(see figure 20.11) was created by using the mask to select the main flamingo so that copies of him/her could be pasted into the photograph.
figure 20.11
That's it...