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Water Mask Help

L

leemer

Messages
19
I am trying to figure out how to create a water mask for rivers and ponds and lakes etc. I am assuming the water mask will allow the photo real color to show with added water effects correct me if I am wrong.

I need to figure out the easiest way to create water masks with already available BMP's from my photo scenery. And I am using GIMP

Please explain how to do this for a slow person from creation to rendering it.
 
What I generally do is create the water and shoreline areas using vector terrain (SBuilderX tool). You can use your image as a background in SBX if you need to trace the shorelines.

Then I create a blendmask for the photo terrain image. In GIMP I usually load my bmp and then create a layer with a copy. I work on this copy layer, so I can always turn up the transparency and see the original photo in the base layer if I need to. Then I set my areas of white (full photo) and black (full vector terrain) using select by color or freehand selection then bucket fill with the appropriate color. I find it best to keep in RGB color mode to make selection by color easier. Save at this point as xcf in case you want to re-edit later.

Then I can convert to grayscale. Now I use a gradient tool or clone tool to create a strip of blend from white to black. The idea is that the land is white (except where I need to blend at the edge of my photo). The water is black. I make some of the near-shore water gray, so that it picks up some of the photo color. You might want to also use a waterclass file so that the water (which will show where your mask is black) is the right color to match up with your photo water areas.

Once I have the layer looking the way I want I save a second version as xcf, then save just the blend layer as a 256 grayscale tiff.

In your inf file use the multisource example with the blendmask in your photo source pointing to the second source, which is the file just created. The dimensions will be the same as the main image.

scott s.
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