Layer Mask in Photoshop

 

In this video, I'm going to show you how to create a layer mask in Photoshop now; you can add a mass to a layer and use that mass to hide portions of the layer and reveal the layers below such masking layers is a valuable compositing technique for combining multiple photos so let's say for instance.

we wanted to remove the background from this photo and let's say add another background or maybe take that image into illustrator or in design with transparency what we can do is apply a layer mask from the layers panel and if you hover over the add layer mask icon and click once you see that it adds what's called a layer mask, and right now it's revealing all, so it's white now if we were to paint with black on this layer mask black will subtract

From the image or hide the pixels, and let's see that I will grab the brush tool from the tools panel. I'm going to make sure that black is in my foreground. I'm going to turn my opacity up to a hundred percent, and if I start to paint with black while I'm on the layer mask, I'm hiding these pixels, 

And it's important for me to say that I'm hiding pixels and not erasing pixels because I'm working non-destructively if you look at the layer mask in the layers panel you can see where I painted with black and that it's hiding the pixels from the thumbnail now I want to make sure I'm not working on the thumbnail itself.

If I were to click on the thumbnail and start to paint then I would be affecting actual pixels so you can see here the brackets are around the thumbnail that's letting me know that I'm working directly on the pixels first is clicking on the layer mask to where

I can hide and reveal from that mask now we want her to have eyes, so I'm going to switch back to white in my color picker. I'm going to paint the layer mask with white to see how I'm bringing the pixels back, so we're working non-destructively. 

They didn't go anywhere. We didn't erase them. We're just hiding and revealing again if you look at the layer mask I painted with white on the layer mask, which brought back those pixels now if I wanted to delete this layer mass, I could right-click on it and select delete layer mask, or if I liked what I did, I could say apply. 

Still, in this case, I want to go ahead and delete it because I want to show you one more thing, and that's that you can create a layer mask based on a selection, so I'm going to grab my pen tool from the tool panel.

 And I'm just going to create a quick pap here around the woman because you can make selections from paths, so that's what I'm going to do here. I'm just going to go around the woman quickly here with the pen tool, and once I connect to the other side, I'll be able to make a selection from this path. Okay, just going around here quickly now. 

Once I've connected to the other side, I can go over to my paths panel, and I can make a selection from this path, and all I need to do is to click on this little icon here to load the path as a selection.

When I click on that you can see the marching ants appear around the woman now if I wanted to create a layer mask off of this selection I can do what we did before I'll go to the Layers panel and I'll click on the add layer mask icon and when

I do that you can see that it created a layer mask based on that selection, and that's nice because I'm not happy with some of the hard edges here, so if I were to grab my brush tool by hitting be on my keyboard and selecting black in the foreground because remember black is going to hide. 

While working on the layer mask, I can paint with black to soften up these edges. Now, if I'm going too far, you can reduce the opacity of the brush just a little bit. We don't want too much better'n. Still, we could go around the hair and soften up some of the hair strands here so that it's not so harsh. If we go too far, as I did just now, I'm going to zoom in on this. 

All I would need to do is switch to white in my foreground and a shortcut for that, by the way, is X on your keyboard to toggle between foreground and background, but if I went too far as I did, I could select white.

And I could start to paint back some of that mask, and I'm going to switch back to black, or you can hit X on your keyboard and soften up some of these edges so now you see we've created  transparency in Photoshop and we could also save this as a tiff with layers or as a PSD and bring that into illustrator or in design,

While in Photoshop let's say I wanted to change the background so I'm going to slide over to another document and I'm just going to drag and drop this golf course into this image, and I'm going to move it below the woman layer, and now she's enjoying a sunny day on the golf course and that my friends are