When you’re working with images or photographs, you need to have some specific tools available to help you customize them, such as filters, color editors and of course masks and selection tools. There are many ways to make selections in Photoshop, including the marquee tool, making paths and turn them into selections, using the polygonal lasso and finally the quick mask. This tip will show how to use the quick mask to increase your edition speed while working with pictures.

This trick is often used by photographers, but it works with for anyone at different levels, all you need to have is an image for edit and a basic Photoshop knowledge.

1. Use the magic wand / quick selection tool

With these tools you can quickly select a determined part of an image with a determined level of tolerance that you can adjust before selecting, you can find the magic wand/quick selection tool at the Photoshop’s toolbar.

You can make all the necessary adjustments before selecting at the top bar.

Now you can proceed making the selection, the tool will choose objects that have similarities among them, specially chromatic similarities.

2. Enable and start working with the quick mask

Now that we made the selection, hit the G key and you will instantly access to the quick mask mode, you will notice because everything gets a red vibe around it.

Quick mask is a safe zone, where no matter what you do, your image will not be affected as long as you don’t leave the mode. Quick mask works like this: Everything you see in red is what has not been selected and the parts that are visualized on their original tone are the parts that you chose with the magic wand tool. On this mode you will be working on the selection, everything that you clean will be added to the selection and on the other hand, everything that you paint will be discarded from the selected area.

Of course you can use all the regular tools to work on Quick Mask, for example, you can make a path, turn it into a selection and then erase them to add it to the selection.

And now just turn it into a selection from the Paths contextual menu.

Having this done, just delete it to add this new part to our selection.

Finally, hit the G key one more time to leave the Quick Mask mode and there you have it, that’s how the quick mask works, now you can make professional selections in Photoshop in just a few minutes.