A Beginner’s Guide to LAYERS and Layer MASKS in PHOTOSHOP

[Music] hey guys this is Anthony Morgan T I am mr. photographer dot-com this video is for the beginner someone just getting started using Photoshop I know when I first started to use Photoshop the concept of layers was foreign to me and how layer masks worked with layers just added to the confusion and I really didn't understand what layers did in Photoshop why they were necessary and what you could do with them so in this video I'm going to give you the very basics of layers to hopefully give you a better understanding of what they're used for in Photoshop along with the layer masks now I have this image here this is actually a really old image of my youngest son Joe he's an adult now but as you could see he's in the park sitting in the middle of this bench I also have another image it's my son Joe sitting on that same bench but he's on the far left hand side of the bench so we just have single layers in both of these tabs and I want to put them together so we're going to have two layers in one tab so I'm going to go to this image and I'm going to use the Move tool a little keyboard shortcut for the move tool is the V key V is in victory and it's the top tool over here in the tool well so we're just going to click on this layer hold the left mouse button in and drag it up to that first tab and then hold it over that image and I'm gonna hold the shift key down while I let go of the left mouse button that will drop it right in the middle so it's perfectly lined up now you could see when I did that that layer that I just dragged over there totally obscured the layer below it if we look over in the layers panel you can see we have that as layer one layer one is the layer we dragged over it's over here on the second tab I dragged it over there and it's totally covering up layer zero I'll turn layer one off and you can see that layer zero is there now if I turn layer one back on this is where masking comes in you could use masks to have parts of other layers come through so down here below the layer panel at the very bottom you'll see a little rectangle with a circle in the middle that's to add a mask so we're going to add a mask to layer zero click on it and by default it will add a white mask now if you watched any videos of Photoshop training you might have heard the teacher say white reveals black conceals what that person is talking about is the mask we have a white mask here now a white reveals what it means is it's allowing this top layer the layer that it is associated with to be revealed so basically it did nothing in this case we just added the mask but nothing has changed it's just allowing that top layer to be revealed I could turn off the layer and still see the layer below it but still we haven't done anything now the second part of that little saying is black conceals so that's implying if we put black on this layer mask it will conceal this top layer so a quick way to put black onto that mask there's a lot of different ways to do it we could invert it we could go up to the menu and do things but one way is to use a keyboard shortcut that will add this bottom swatch you can see we have swatches here the top is white the bottom is black if I want to add that bottom color to this layer what I could do is use the keyboard shortcut of holding in the control or command key and it's control if you have a PC command if you have a Mac and hitting the Delete key and when I do that it fills that layer with black and you can see as soon as I did that it conceals the layer that it's associated with so now if I turn it off and on you can see nothing's happening because it's totally blocking out that layer allowing layer 0 to show so very basics of masks white white reveals black conceals so we're concealing that top layer well there's more to it than that let's say I want to fill this with something other than white or black let's go up to edit down to fill and you can see that we have a fill dialog and there's 50% gray in this drop-down let's fill it with 50% gray and see what happens so I'll click OK now you can see part of one layer is coming through while the other part of other other layers showing through so shades of grey will vary the amount of opacity of the actual mask so now being 50% gray we have exactly half of one layer showing through in exactly half of the other layer showing through now for demonstration purposes I'm going to go over here in the tool well and I'm going to get the burn tool the burn tool will darken something so every brush stroke will make something a little bit darker and now there's three different things we could click on in the layers panel we could click on layer 0 we could click on layer 1 or we could click on the mask for layer 1 so make sure you're clicked on the mask for layer 1 I have the burn tool so I'm going to make some of that gray a darker gray by using the burn tool so I'm gonna paint right here and when I paint right there you could see I'm making that bottom layer layer 0 come in a little bit stronger so we'll bring in death all right now next to that burn tool in that same little cubby in the tool well over here we have the Dodge tool the Dodge tool will make something lighter so we're still clicked on that layer mask that is gray with a little bit of a different shade of gray in the middle I'm going to paint this now the Dodge tool on the left hand side now it's making this image are part of his head at least come through a little better now what exactly did we do let's take a look at that mask I'm gonna hold the alt option key and it's also if you have a PC option if you have a Mac and click right on the mask and now it's showing the mask so you can see we have 50% gray almost everywhere so that's allowing half a layer zero to come through and half a layer one to show but in the middle I earned it so it's darker gray is actually black in parts so now that it's black it's allowing all of layer zero to show through this is the bottom layer because it's black conceals it's concealing the layer its associated with then over here I dodged this part so I made it lighter gray as a matter fact I made it I dodged it so much I made it white so that reveals that reveals the layer its associated with so it's allowing all of layer one to show right where I paint it and that's why we got that effect now I'll hold that alt option key and again and click on the layer mask again and we're back to what we see so again I could just turn that off and you can see we're right back because turning that off turns off not only layer one but it turns off the mask for layer 1 so it's allowing all the layers here it'll come through so those that's really just the very basics of layers there's so much more you could do with it as a matter of fact I have a video where I use the two images we used in this video and a third image of my son sitting on the far right side of the bench and what we did in that video is I demonstrated how you could create one image with my son sitting in all three places on the bench I'll have a link to that video in the description below this video and also have a little flag pop up in the top right hand corner of this video with a link to that video watch that video to learn how to do that with layers and layer masks and you could download the images for free to practice on your own so check out that video I hope this video helps you just get an idea the very very basics of layers and layer masks because really that is the foundation you need to really understand Photoshop you need to understand layers and layer masks and hopefully this will help you to that end thank you everyone who watches my videos I really do appreciate it I'll talk to you guys soon

Channel: Anthony Morganti

Views: 45,147

Keywords: photoshop tutorial, photoshop layers, how to use layers photoshop, what is a layer photoshop, layers tutorial photoshop, photoshop beginner tutorial, beginner layers tutorial photoshop, layers for beginners photoshop, photoshop tutorials for beginners, move tool photoshop tutorial, photography, landscape photography, travel, photoshop, layer masks, layers, pixel layers, adjustment layers, post processing, tutorial, adobe, how to, morganti, anthony morganti, photoshop layer masks, edit

Id: PQhgUB4d1cE

Length: 9min 14sec (554 seconds)

Published: Sat May 23 2020