A mask is essentially a flat shape that covers elements in your design, normally these are 8 bit spot layers. they can be created using separation or drawn manually, the mask can the be selected to isolate areas when doing tonal separations.
Masking elements in designs could be seen as a slightly old fashioned method of producing your colour separation and you might think that with AVA’s advanced separation features that there would be no need to mask out parts in your designs, however in many cases masking areas is essential to you give you the control you need of the tones and enable you to get nice clean separations. Making good masks might be the most time consuming part of your separation process, but once you have good masks you can select these areas easily which will speed up the next part of the process and give you far better separations.
In my example below, I made 3 simple layer masks using a combination of: Auto Tonal, Despeckle and Mover (to clean up). A mask for the leaves, background and flowers.
Below is an example to illustrate the advantage of having a mask and how it can be used.
In the image above, I am trying to separate the light pink in the flowers, I need this layer to be quite flat as the other darker pink colours should fall on top, but as you can see when I decrease the slider in Advanced Colour separation I get areas of pink in the background and even some in the green. I could take the slider the other way, but then the tones in the flower are too tonal so the other colour would not sit nicely on top of the light pink.
However if I select my ‘flower’ mask (Select All > Select > Snap) before making the Advanced colour separation you can see (above) that the separation is only done within the selected area. This makes if far easier to get the tones I want and it means there is no unwanted pink in other areas in the design which could look bad when you are making colourways of the design.
Typically masks are useful in designs where you have motifs that are clear sets of colours that don’t blend with others. We have said that mask are useful / essential even, for many designs, there will of cause be designs where they are less appropriate such as when all the colours blend together. However you can also have tonal masks that you might use to adjust tones in a texture.
Some other features in AVA that may help you mask your designs include: