So I created a group layer with masking and set all layers to "add to mask" and "exclude strokes" and "expand mask by one pixel" except the highlight layer which is set to "mask this layer." However "exclude strokes" doesn't seem to be working consistently. See the examples on the left. Am I doing something wrong? This usually works for me. The only major difference I can see is that I don't usually use brushes. Do brushes cause this issue?
Also, I thought that expand by one pixel was supposed to resolve white pixel issues with masking. Is there another fix for this? See image on right. It's probably not a big deal since I'm adding the speckled texture anyway, but I'm curious why it's happening.
And my third question! Is there a simple way to apply the texture overlay only to the fills? Maybe the solution is to photoshop the texture and color together first and use it as a fill effect instead of an overlay effect?
Nice style. But I'm afraid there's no easy, automatic solution.
Textures are easy as long as they contain dark spots, because you can apply them per multiply over all of the character - as long as the strokes are black.
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I've used multiply with greys and also with the same colour as the fill I want textured... in fact anything but white will (usually) have an effect.
greys darken all the colour channels (RGB) by the same factor -- e.g. 50% grey (R,G,B all 127) will halve the colour values in the overlaid area
black multiplied over any colour produces black
white (R,G,B all 255) leaves the colour unchanged.
it works channel by channel -- so if you have a base colour (say) R:127, G:255, B: 0 and you multiply by pure Red (or, indeed, R:255, G:0 and any value of Blue) you get a result that's R:127 (unchanged), G:0 (because you're multiplying G:255 by G:0 -- anything times zero is zero); and B:0 for the same reason. Similarly multiplying by yellow (R:255, G:255, B:0) leaves that colour unchanged because it started out without any Blue in it.
my own approach is to use stroke with custom brushes to overlay the filled shape - drawn or masked to keep the strokes over the required filled area..
Thanks slowtiger and hayasidist! I tried a few other things looking for a workaround. I tried freeing up some ram (in case it was a ram issue). I also tried creating smaller masking groups with only the shape layer and the highlight layer. That gave me a slightly better masking result. But just creating the highlights on the same layer as the shape seems to give the best rendering result. And I suppose I can live with the textures and white spots around the arm pits. :D Thanks again!
