Blend two masks

[spiderdan]

I have attached a picture of the issue I am experiencing. I have taken a photo and made a selection around the foreground. Note that, while I am no photoshop expert, this selection was made painstakingly and I could not make a great amount of improvement with this photo. If the resolution where higher it would be a different story. This was taken with a consumer level camera and I had to crop out a bit of the picture as well. It's the best I have to work with. Anyway, I used this selection to make a levels mask. I then retrieved the selection from this mask, inversed it, and created a second mask. In this way I was able to adjust the foreground and background levels separately. For the most part this worked well but I am getting a halo of, usually blue, discoloration where the layers meet. While this certainly doesn't ruin the picture and its only bad in a few places, it would make the quality of this picture much better if I could remove this. Does anyone know of a method to remedy this? Thanks!


http://i112.photobucket.com/albums/n...98/problem.jpg

[iDad]

try selecting the area inverse,feather .5pix? maybe1 or 2 then inverse again >image> adjustments>Hue saturation, it will take some fine tunoing of levels but it will work,I just did it

[spiderdan]

Thanks for the reply iDad. I had moderate success with your method. Threw in some level adjustments as well. A bit more time and patience and I could make some real improvements, but that is a job for tomorrow. Just to be clear, you were referring to selecting only the effected areas (as opposed to using the pre-existing selections from the masks)? I was hoping there would be some sort of automated way I could blend the area between the two masks, but perhaps no such method exists. Forgot to mention I'm using CS3, so I have the edge refining tool. Seems like it could be useful but I'm not familiar with it and have only had a little luck when selecting only the affected areas. Could not get it to work with mask selections but maybe its not meant to.

[iDad]

perhaps wehen you merge layers try using layer in overlaymode, tat my hide very tough to see from that small image but if your in separate layers mess around with that overlay layer mode option.....