Quick Mask is a tool in Adobe Photoshop that allows you to easily isolate an area of the layer you’re working on. This translates to being able to take a man out of 1 picture so that you can place him in different picture, among other nifty things. Like most Photoshop tools, there’s 1 way to do it, and then there’s 100 other ways. In this tutorial I’ll be teaching you the method that I use on a regular basis to quickly use the… quick… mask.

Here’s the image we’ll work with.

Our goal here will be to extract Construction Man and the paper he’s holding and place him on a new image. Let’s start by firing up Photoshop, opening this image, and switching to Quick Mask Mode. This can be done by pressing “Q” on your keyboard or clicking the following button on your Tools window (Window > Tools if you don’t have this open).

Now select the “Paint Bucket Tool”, and fill in your entire picture, it doesn’t matter what color. If you are in quick mask mode, you’ll see a red overlay appear on your picture.

Select the “Polygonal Lasso Tool” and its sub-option “Add to Selection” (the depressed options are shown below). Zoom in real close so you have a precise environment to work in, and begin selecting an area of the man’s lag with the P.Lasso tool. Once you have a nice chunk, press your delete key and you’ll see the red overlay disappear and the colors of his pants will appear. The beauty of the lasso tool is you can cut him out piece by piece at your own pace, give it a few tries, it shouldn’t take long to master this tool.

Your image should look like the following once you have fully cut out Construction Man using the P.Lasso tool. If you’ve made a mistake, you can choose the brush tool to fill in the red overlay.

Now let’s exit Quick Mask Mode (Press “Q” or click the button again). You should now have the entire man selected, press “CTRL+C” and “CTRL+V”, this will paste the extracted Construction Man on a new layer by himself, leaving the original picture intact below it. You can now move Construction Man wherever he pleases, like so:

Have fun with it! It’s a really useful tool for any graphic designer.