How to Create Clipping Masks in GIMP 2.10

[Music] [Music] hello and welcome to yet another tutorial by Davies media design my name is Michael Davies and in today's tutorial I'll be showing you guys how to create clipping masks using this is 2.10 point 8 which is the latest version of at the time of this tutorial but of course before we get into that I want to direct you guys over to my website at Davies media design com as always we have tons of video and text tutorials on here so definitely check that out you can also enroll in my 2.10 photo editing masterclass from beginner to pro which is a best-seller on udemy and you could support our channel and help us grow by becoming a patron on patreon and on cluding to this as well as all the relevant links from this tutorial in the description of the video so I'll be using two photos for today's tutorial because I am going to be combining them using a few layer masks and then also a clipping mask and you can download these images completely for free from my Flickr page so here's the Flickr page and I'll have this linked in the description of the video so it's these two photos right here and these photos have both been edited so all you have to do is download them and once you've downloaded them just find the location where you downloaded them on the computer right-click and go to open with and choose a new image manipulation program which of course is what stands for I'm gonna do that with my final composition here so you guys can see the composition we're gonna be creating so here is our final composition and I just exported this as a PNG file so everything's been compressed onto a single layer here but you could see I added our two photos I have them fading into one another and then I have them both clipped into this ellipse shape so it's almost inside this ellipse frame and that was using the clipping mask or the layer group mask as it's called in so a clipping mask by its most basic definition is just applying a layer mask to a group of layers that's why it's called layer group mask in and this is actually a new feature that was added in 2.10 so if you're using an older version of you won't be able to use this feature but the main benefit of this feature is that you can add separate layer masks to other layers individual layers and then you can compound that mask with another layer group mask or a clipping mask so in this case we've combined the two photos using layer masks and then we've clipped both of the photos using an additional layer mask or a layer group mask in order to frame them with this ellipse shape our so without further ado let's dive in here so go to file new and I set my original width and height to 2,000 by 1280 and if I come down here I'm gonna set my X and wide resolution make sure that your resolution is set to pixels per inch right here and I just set this to 72 and for fill with I just chose background color because I want to fill this with white you can also just come over here and change this to white if you want and I'll click OK I'll hold ctrl and use my mouse wheel to zoom out so both of our images are nineteen twenty by twelve eighty in so we're gonna be combining both of them onto the single image window so what I have to do here is come over to our first image so I can click and drag this tab over here to our composition so make sure you drag it over the tab where your composition is and then you have to drag your mouse down onto the actual image window and release that we'll add our first image layer as what's called a dropped buffer layer you can always just double click on this and rename this woman or whatever you want to name your layer so that's one method for bringing photos into your composition as a layer you can also go to file open as layers and then once you've navigated to the location where your file is just scroll down and click on that file and click open and that'll open up your image as a layer as well this will open it up as the name of your file so I'll just rename this man but you can use that same method of just clicking and dragging this tab over here onto the tab of your composition and then dropping it right here on your composition that of course will create a dropped buffer layer but in this case we've already got both of our layers in here so now you'll see we have three layers total we've got our man layer our woman layer in our background layer I'm actually going to click and drag this layer up because I want this to be our top layer and that's going to place our man layer below so next what I'll do is I'm going to create my layer group and this is sort of the most important aspect of this tutorial and all I have to do is come over here to my layers panel and click right here to create a new layer group and I'm gonna come up here and just name this clipping mask and hit enter so you can rename a layer group just like you can rename a layer and now what I'll do is I'll click and drag each one of these layers into the layer group and you can always tell that your drag into the lair group because you'll see a dotted line here around the entire layer group icon so go ahead and drop that and you'll see that our image for our layer group will change from that default folder image or that default folder icon to the first image in our layer group and now I'm going to click and drag our second layer into this layer group so again I can either hover it over the layer group and you'll see the dotted line show up or I can come down here and you'll see there's almost like a half line right there and that's just denoting we're inside this layer group you're gonna be dragging and dropping your layer so I want to drag this to the bottom of the layer group because I still want the woman at the top of the layer group and now both of our files are inside this layer group and they're in the correct stacking order you can also use these arrows right here to change the stacking order and you'll see that if I change the top image in my layer group that icon will now change but the next thing I want to do is make sure that both of my layers are the same size of my composition so this is a fairly common problem you import a couple of photos or a couple layers into your composition that are smaller than the overall size of your image window and you can see that right here so our image layer actually ends where this black and yellow dotted line is right here or this dashed line and then this is the actual end of our image window if I click on our background layer you can see now the dotted line is on our background layer so there's a little bit of a gap right here and that's gonna show up in the layer masks and the clipping mask and we don't want that to show up there we don't want there to be that gap so what I'll do is I'll click on this woman layer and I'm gonna go to layer layer to image size and that'll make the layer the woman layer here the same exact size of our composition and then I'll do the same thing for the man layer so I'll click on that layer go to layer layer to image size and now both of our photo layers are the same size of our composition so the next step is to add the actual clipping mask or the layer group mask so to do that I'll click on our clipping mask layer group and then what I'll do is I'll come over here and in this case I want to draw an ellipse and I want our layer mask to be the same shape as that ellipse so when I grab my select tool and I'm going to draw my ellipse selection area from the top left of my composition down to the bottom right and then I'll release and that will create a selection err you'll see that the selection area goes a little bit outside of our photo that's all right we're gonna move our photos into the proper positions here in a second so once I've done that I'm going to come over here to my layer group my clipping mask layer group right click and go to add layer mask and under initialize layer mask - in this case I'll choose selection and that is going to draw our layer mask in the shape of this selection here and now I'm gonna click Add and now you can see our layer mask has been applied to all photos in the group that's why neither of these photos are showing up right here in this area where they're supposed to be they're all being clipped out right now by this clipping mask or this layer group mask and now if I hit ctrl shift a that will deselect our selection area and one quick thing I want to point out here is that whenever you're clicked on a layer group and not an individual layer you'll see that dashed line that denotes the image window size or the layer size is going to be actually more like a light blue color whereas if I'm clicked on an individual layer that'll be a black and yellow dashed line so that's how you could tell your clicked on a layer group versus an individual layer alright so we clicked on this individual woman layer here and you'll see that our image is being cut off right here the clipping mask ends sort of short and that's kind of screwing up our ellipse shape and the reason for that of course is that our image is not currently the same size of our composition so what I'll do is I'll grab my move tool and I'm gonna click and I'm going to drag this photo to the left if I hold ctrl it'll drag it in straight line mode and I'm looking at this number down here you'll see there's a number on the right and that is just telling me if that's zero that means I'm not moving this up or down which is what I want I only want to move this left to right so I'm going to frame this so that the girl is just on the left edge of this ellipse shape here and you can't see the man layer behind this image right now because this image is covering it up but you can see over here that the image has now filled out the left side of this ellipse shape and the right side still has a little chunk missing but we're gonna fix that in a second so what we need to do in order to show the man layer beneath the woman layer is we need to add a layer mask on here and this is where clipping masks really come in handy because now I can right-click and go to add layer mask and in this case I'm just going to go with Y full opacity for now and that just means that the layer mask won't do anything until we paint black on it so I'll click Add and that'll add a white layer mask here now I'm going to come over here to my blend tool or my gradient tool and I'm gonna come down here and change the shape of this to linear I'm gonna make sure that the colors of my gradient go from foreground to background you can either do HSB or RGB it doesn't really matter in this case and then what I'll do is I'll click and drag my gradient and I'll hold the control key to draw this in straight line mode and this of course is not looking the way we want it to look so what we have to do is actually hit the reverse button here to reverse the colors in our gradient so now you can see that our photo of our girl here or our woman is fading into the photo of our man I actually want to bring this over just a tiny bit because we do have a little bit of a white edge here that I want to make sure it doesn't show up in the final you can also adjust the midpoint here to adjust you know how far out the fade goes for this image and you can adjust the end point here so make my adjustments and once I'm ready I'm just going to hit the enter key so now we have a nice fade from the image on the left to the image on the right but of course now I need to move the image of the man so what I'll do is I'll click on that individual layer grab the move tool and then click on that man layer and just move it to the right while holding the ctrl key so that I'll drag this over to the right so we'll drag it right there and now we have this nice composition thanks to our clipping mask or our layer group mask where we have one photo fading into another and then we have it all framed by this lip shape I can of course show or hide the background here or I could change the background color in Photoshop you can actually mess around with the clipping mask a little bit after you've drawn it so you can disable it you can delete it there's a couple other things you can do with it so in gif there's actually some flexibility with the layer group mask as well just like the clipping mask in Photoshop so pretty much anything I could do to a standard layer mask I can do to this layer group mask so for example I can click on the layer group mask right click and go down here and check the show layer mask option so if I check that I could see the shape of my actual layer mask I can also right click click on that again to hide it and then let's right click on this one more time and come down here to disable layer masks so that will temporarily turn the layer mask off or the layer group mask and so now we can see what these two photos look like with just the blend and without the layer group mask and then of course I can right click and I can click the disable the layer mask option again and that will turn it back on and I can right click on here and go to delete layer mask and that'll just delete it entirely so now that layer mask is no longer on our layer group I'm gonna hit ctrl Z because I do want that layer mask there and of course we can add black or white to the layer group mask so anywhere we add black is going to create transparency and show the layers below and anywhere we paint white is going to turn that into full opacity alright so now I'm going to move on to exporting this so in this case I'm just going to export this to a PNG so I'll hide the background go to file export as so I'll just name this clipping mask composition and then I'll come down here to select file type by extension and I'm just going to choose PNG image and then I'll hit export and I've already created this composition once so I'm just going to replace it and I'll keep all the default settings the same and hit export again and there we go alright guys so that's it for this tutorial thanks for watching if you liked it please subscribe to our YouTube channel at youtube.com slash Davey's media design we recently hit 30,000 subscribers so I just want to thank everybody who has watched our videos subscribe to our Channel and just supported the channel in any way that you have over the years I definitely appreciate all you guys watching and subscribing you can also visit our website at Davey's media design com you can enroll in my best-selling 2.10 photo editing masterclass from beginner to pro on udemy and II could support our channel and help us grow by becoming a patron on patreon and I'll include a link to that as well as all the relevant links from this tutorial in the description of the video so thanks for watching and we'll see you next time

Channel: Davies Media Design

Views: 13,510

Rating: 4.7225432 out of 5

Keywords: gimp, gimp tutorial, gimp for beginners, how to gimp, gimp graphic design, gimp photo editing, gimp 2019, GIMP 2.10, GIMP, basics, clipping masks, layer masks, layer group masks, GIMP 2.10.8, blend photos, photo blend, crop photos, circle crop, photo manipulation, photoshop, photoshop vs. gimp

Id: PuJVgIyPXI0

Length: 13min 11sec (791 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 20 2019