Choose the second Apha Channel and do an Image-Adjustments-Invert to get the same 'white foreground/black background' as the other Alpha channel. This is going to allow us to combine the 2 channels.

Hold your cursor over the icon in the Alpha 2 Channel and hold down the CTRL key as you click. This will make a selection out of the channel. With that selection loaded, move your cursor over the icon in the Alpha 1 Channel, hold down CTRL and SHIFT and click. This will add the 2 selections together.

Now click on the square at the bottom of the Channels pallette and choose 'Make new channel from current selection. Switch back to the layers pallette and choose the Make Mask square at the bottom (shown above). This will load the mask into the layer.


Here's our image with the mask applied. As you can see we got the detail in the hair that we were looking for. Unfortunatly, we got a lot of green bleed in the hair from the background (a result of less than perfect lighting. No worries, we'll take it out in the next steps.

<NEXT>