How do you do this?

[ehume]

I start out with this:

What I want to do is have a ghostly (faded) horse running across the plains. I have made a selection from the horse, promoted the selection to a layer, made a mask from the image -- I thought. I colored the mask black, then white. I made another layer from the selection. This time, I faded the layer to 50% opacity. It went on top. The whole point was to block the horse from showing through while the background showed through with full strength. Then the horse would be replaced by a ghost horse. Only it didn't work. What am I missing, here?

[ehume]

I managed the effect I wanted. Mostly (there are some stray hairs showing through). I duplicated both the promoted selection layer (and set it to full opacity) and the bottom layer, then merged them. I then deleted the resulting selection. That left me with a background with a hole in it. I plugged the hole with the 50% opaque horse layer group from the top stacks, and I had my effect:

I got the effect. But the point of the exercise was to learn to use masks. There, it was a dismal failure.

[ehume]

Finally figured it out. Created the Mask layer not from an empty selection, but from a selection filled with an image. And create the new mask from inverse data (there is a checkbox for that). So I end with

Faded layer of just the horse*
Group (can be ungrouped)
Mask of horse selection*
Full background*

* Necessary layer

So, there is indeed a relatively easy way to do this, and it involves a mask. Nice to know.

[Jean-Luc]

- Selection of the horse promoted to a layer.
- Fill the background with Clone Brush.
- Duplicate the Background and set to Multiply.
- Activate the horse layer and set Opacity to 46.
We could add some motion with the Adjust/Blur/Motion Blur tool.

[ehume]

Thanks.