What I love about the masks in DT is the ability to feather and blur the mask after it is created to achieve an invisible transition. However, I avoid using raster masks because this ability is lost. I am just curious as to why this is the case.
Its just a copy of the mask from the source module so you have to set the mask there or go back and change it there… Remember the pixelpipe is sequential and cumulative flowing input data to the module, processing that, blending if there are masks and then creating output which then becomes the input data for the next module… The raster masks are snapshots of masks produced by any module earlier in the process than the one you are currently in but that’s all it can be ie a copy of the mask created with the state of the data at that time… If you need to alter it then you have to go back to that source module and the changes would need to be useful and or appropriate for every subsequent module where you used that raster mask… It can sometimes be useful to create the raster mask in an early module like the exposure module… You can name it and then go back and tweak it if needed and you could copy it so you can have very similar but independent masks that you can tweak a little differently for later use in other modules…
If you think about why we have the raster mask in the first place, it makes sense you can’t change it between modules:
There was no way to reuse a parametric mask between modules. But sometimes you wanted to reuse the exact same mask (pixel-by-pixel identical) in several modules. Almost impossible to do with parametric masks, you need raster masks (*). But for that usecase, you don’t need (or want) any change between the two uses of the mask…
If you only use drawn mask elements, you don’t need raster masks. You can reuse the drawn mask and then modify the feathering, blurring etc.
(*: as you know, parametric masks are based on pixel values. Those values are different before and after a module, so the mask generated from the parameters will be different…)
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Thanks for the replies here. I guess the only time I am needing to use a raster mask is when it is based on a parametric mask. I just opened DT and created a parametric mask and applied very obvious feathering and then when I created a raster mask I noticed that the feathering was retained in the copy. I didn’t realize this was the case because when you use drawn masks across multiple modules you have to redo the feather and blur sliders each time. I had presumed the same was the case with raster masks, but it is not.
I guess I was expecting the feather and blur sliders and wondering why they were not available, but I guess in reality they are not needed.
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