How to use Photoshop layer masks for beginners

if you've ever been confused by layer masks or you really want to understand them and also get a few little extra tips this is the video for you I'm now gonna explain a layer masks in Photoshop for beginners [Music] hey cafe crew it's Colin Smith here from Photoshop cafe.com and today I'm gonna share with you a second beginners tutorial last week we did layers this week we're gonna do layer masks so if you don't understand layers I'll leave a link underneath to that one so let's get started right now with layer masks I'm gonna explain to you exactly how they work and then I'm gonna show you different ways that you can use them and if you're new here hit a subscribe button right now and turn on all notifications so you don't miss a tutorial from me all right let's have a look here at layer masks so what I've done is I've created a very very basic image to kind of demonstrate this I've got two layers on here we've got the bottom layer which is saying bottom and then I created another layer above it which says top and obviously these two at different colors we've got blue on top and yellow underneath all right so let's explain what do layer masks do layer masks allow us to show things from different layers at the same time but what does that mean it's like well what we want to do is we've got a layer here we want to cut holes in it so we can see what's going on underneath now usually when you first item Photoshop the first thing you probably do to try and do that is you're gonna go in here and maybe you're gonna grab the eraser tool so we've got this top layer selected and notice it's called top and as I cut with this al8 eraser tool or paint with it notice what it does is it cuts a hole in here and allows the layer underneath to show through if I hide the layer underneath you can see the checkerboard and this means we've got transparency so there's nothing showing because that underneath is hidden so essentially what we're doing is we're just cutting it out just like taking a photograph and taking a pair of scissors and just cutting a hole in it the problem with this is if we change our mind later on there's no way to fix it we can't plug up those holes we have to actually start with a new image so this is the problem that layer masks solve let me turn on the layer underneath now I'm just going to move it around just so you can kind of see so let's take the top layer and notice as I move that layer around you can see that's the top layer you can see the layer underneath showing and you can see that we've got that whole cut out in that layer right there so rather than cutting out the hole on the pixels and destroying the image what we want to do is find a way that we can cut out these holes without affecting our pixels permanently and the way to do that is with a layer mask so if we're in the layers panel right now and we go down in the layers panel and you'll see this little icon it's a little rectangle with an oval on the inside of it now notice we've got this top layer selected when we click on this mask what it does is it creates a mask on the layer that's selected okay so it's showing is white right now and notice that it's not affecting that layer the layer is still visible so how this works is we paint on this mask with black so what we're gonna do is we're gonna go and we're gonna grab a brush let's just grab a paintbrush here under the brush under the tools here and let's just go up to the settings here and you'll notice this different types of brushes there you'll see them in here so why don't we just start with a simple hard round brush or really doesn't matter but the important thing is we want to make sure this brush is black so if we go down here under our color swatches here's our foreground color that's that background click on the foreground color and then just move that to black click OK now there's another way to do this a keyboard shortcut is hit to deke and it resets the foreground and background colors to white and black and now to switch them hit the X key and that's a quick way to get black as your foreground color now I want to make this brush bigger I can go up here and I can change the size of the brush and what I'm gonna do now is I'm going to paint just like I was um remember when we took the eraser tool and then we cut that hole in here we're gonna do the same thing with a black brush but this time notice we've got a layer and a mask see that little white area around it that means that's selected click here and make sure the mask is selected and you'll also notice up under here under the title you'll see it says mask that means that we're working on the mask watch what happens to this title here when I click on the layer notice it just says RGB 8 if I click on the mask it says layer mask 8 and 8 means it's an 8 bit alright so what we're gonna do now is just paint and notice what we're doing with painting just like we did before and cutting out that top layer and revealing the layer underneath so what's so different about this versus a cutting out with the eraser tool so let's hide the background if you notice it's also transparent but here's a big thing if you look in the layers panel notice how pixels are uneffective and just the mask now has the cutout on it so here's the thing about a mask when the mask is white it fully shows that layer when the mask is black it fully hides that layer and here's a way that you can remember this think about light if the light is on you've got this white light you can see everything if it's dark and it's black you can't see anything that means it's hidden so think about that the layer when you paint with white you are showing there layer when you're painting with black you're hiding the layer that their mask is attached to and some people say it white reveals black conceals all right so let's have a look at the advantage of working with this where is the eraser was taking scissors and cutting out our layer meaning it was destructive this is non-destructive because if I choose white and if I just tap the X key that will switch the foreground background colors remember or you can just click on the swatch there and set it to white watch what happens when we paint with white notice it brings back the contents of that layer now of course if I show the layer underneath we're just peeping through it so what we're doing with the layers is essentially imagine this top layer is a piece of glass in the bottom layer is the background say a window and what we're essentially doing is cleaning the gunk out of the window so we can see through so imagine that that top layer there with the white is the gunk and then we take that black and we paint and it cuts through and enables us to see through that layer and see what's on the other side of it okay so we know then if we apply that layer mask when we apply it it appears white which means that it's lit which means that you can see that entire layer now I'm gonna get rid of this mask just by dragging it into the trash so there's a different way of applying our layer mask because in this case what we do is we're showing the whole layer and we paint away the areas we don't want what if we want to do the opposite so we want to start with that layer but we want the layer to be invisible and we just want to paint on the areas that we want to see so this is the opposite I'm gonna show you how that works and that's called an inverted mask so when we go to create this mask we go down to the mask icon and this time instead of clicking on the mask hold down the Alt key or the option key depending if you're on Mac or Windows and click now the mask is applied notice that this layer is completely invisible if I turn the top layer on and off you don't see anything why is this well if we look at the mosque the mosque is blue and the reason this black is because it's concealed remember what I said about light when the light is bright you can see when it's dark you can't see that lamp because it's black it's dark as pitch black so that black mosque is hiding everything on that layer and this is a good way to work if you only want to use a little bit of the layer so this time obviously if we paint with black it's not gonna do anything because it's already black but if we paint with white now we can start to paint in just the areas that we want to show and you can see here the mosque right there now let me go to a soft edge brush I'm just gonna change this brush because we've got a hard edge brush here I'm just gonna take the hardness down and you'll notice as I paint now we get a softer edge this is a little bit more pleasing and of course the reason I started with the high wage brush is because I wanted it to work like the eraser to make it easy for you to understand and of course with the inverted mask if we want to hide this again we just switch the foreground background tell it to black and once again remember we're working on this top layer which is blue to hide which is black remember white reveals black conceals and so now we're hiding the contents of this layer and of course we're seeing the layer underneath of course if that layer was turned off we would see this so we're just hiding it until it's completely gone all right I have one more fundamental thing I want to teach you about masks before we actually start using them and looking at the different features that are available so so far we know that if we turn out the lights' it becomes black and it hides that layer or wherever we decide to paint with black if we turn on the lights and it's white which is white light it shows the contents of that layer so we understand that now so white is basically turns the layer on black turns the layer off like a light switch what if we don't do white or black what if we go a shade of gray instead of white or black hmm well how that's gonna work is actually gonna work a little bit like a dimmer so instead of the light going on and off we can adjust the dimmer white is the brightest black is the darkest and imagine I like them at however bright you go up and down is gonna determine how much you're gonna see on that layer so the brighter the light the more of that layer you're gonna see the darker the lists are gonna see and that's exactly how layer masks board let me demonstrate so if I go here and I choose to change the color and I'm going into gray and I want to choose at 50% gray now by the way if you look under the color picker here you'll see HSB stands for hue saturation and brightness if you want an exact value click on the B and type in 50 this is now giving me exactly 50% gray click OK now watch what happens when I paint with 50% gray notice right now the two layers are showing equal and the reason for that is when I'm doing 50% gray that's giving me 50% opacity or is like turning that light up 50% so you can see the top layer and the bottom layer equally because I'm painting with 50% gray so here's the thing if I paint with 75% white that's gonna give me 75 percent transparency if I paint with 25% white that's gonna give me 25 percent transparency so the amount of transparency is directly related to the shade of gray that we are working with let me demonstrate so if we click here and we decide you know what I want to make this more white so still gray but it's more white notice we're about 78% right there that be is was gonna shows if you want exactly 75 type it in click okay now watch what happens when I paint notice now more of that top layer is starting to show through and the reason for that is because now we've turned this up to 75% if we turn it up to a hundred percent that's gonna be pure white and then I paint notice it shows that layer at 100% opacity if I click here and I set this to say 25 percent so this is 25 percent white so it's mostly black now remember zero percent white is black so now we're at quarter right which is 25 percent click OK and notice as I paint now it shows the bottom layer stronger than the top layer and that's because now we've turned those lights down all right so that's the fundamentals now let's look at a couple of little features if I want to view the layer mask by itself if I hold down the alt or the option key and I click on that mask it will show me the mask you can see here and if we click back on our layer it will go back to normal and you can see how that affects the transparency all right and if I want to hide this mask I hold the shift key and click on the mask and it will hide that mask and just show that layer as normal shift click once again to bring it back okay the reason I showed you all of that is to really lay a foundation but don't worry if you're a little bit confused this it's gonna become pretty clear when we go through the next example also consider you know watching these fundamentals again until you've grabbed them ok so what happens if I create a gradient so I'm gonna grab the gradient tool right now and I'm gonna do a black to white gradient so I'm just gonna click here and just choose black so I just clicked on H just to get around normal color picker click ok so we got black to white or the D key press the D key reset foreground background okay know what happens if I've got this mask select and I click and I drag across here with my gradient tool and then when I release it's gonna create that linear gradient from black to white and notice what happens where it's white this layer is a hundred percent visible where it's black it's invisible but where that gradient goes that goes through the different shades of gray notice it begins to paint it away and it blends those together this is fundamental for you to understand how we can work here with these masks so let's go into a more practical example right now okay so right here we've got a image we have a woman and on top we have a tiger so rather than doing Chi Tiger King we're gonna do Tiger Queen alright so what we want to do is we want to blend these two together to show how the layer masks work now let me create a layer mask first so if I click on this layer mask now we've got the mask and you remember how before we worked with this gradient why don't we just do that again just so you can see all right so if I click and I just drag a gradient across here notice what it does when I do that gradient now it blends see how smoothly that blends that together and you can actually click and drag further if you click and drag further you'll get a smoother blend and you know I can go different angles here and this is just working with this mask see how we get different looks here just by dragging this across so here's the thing let me just fill this with white the reason I want to fill this with white it just resets the mask and notice we have white as the foreground and I'm just gonna hold down the alt or option key hit delete and that fills it with white and what that does is it resets that mask now if we wanted to turn this to an inverted mask like remember when we created the black mask we can actually just do it here so we can hide everything on this layer with this mask by hitting ctrl I and notice now it's a black mask which mean it's hidden which means that if I decide to paint now with white I can start to paint just the areas that I want to show the pixels so we're kind of making a masker out of a mask and so you can see how that's a lot quicker to work that way let me go here take control I get for a white mask and then I paint with black it takes a little bit longer now I've got to paint all this away see what I'm doing here and that works just as well you still get the same result but if we start with black and then go inverted and you'll still get the same result just remember when we're planting with black we're hiding this top layer and was showing the layer underneath when we're painting with white we're showing the layer on top and hiding the layer underneath and see how we can start to mask and do some different things now remember I showed you that we could adjust this with different shades of gray we can also do this with capacity so if we go up under the opacity here and I turn the opacity down on this brush I can paint and notice I'm just doing a little bit so it's starting to show that texture let's check the mask remember out or option key to click and see that mask that's what it looks like alt or option click again or click on the layer to hide it now I want these eyes to be full force so let's make sure we turn our pasady all the way up to 100 and I want to show the tiger layer remember the white is turning on the light which shows it black is hiding it let's go a hundred percent white so I'm gonna click on the mask make sure we're painting on the mask paint on the eyes and notice now we're showing the tigers eyes now if we wanted to see the woman's eyes who are underneath we do the opposite we paint with black on this paint with black and now her eyes are showing through from underneath now if you wanted to just kind of blend this in a little bit there's different ways of doing it just look at some features if we look at the properties panel here and if you don't see the properties panel it's under window and you'll see it under properties this used to be called the mask pan we have some options here so if I want to soften these edges and kind of blend it together we can choose feather watch what happens as I turn the feather up see how it just starts to blur that a little bit and just kind of blend things together a little bit smoother I'll demonstrate that a little bit more later so let's play around a little bit more let's grab our layer mask and we're gonna use a bigger brush here and I'm just gonna paint out one side and we can see you know one side there is a woman let's hit the X key so now we're gonna paint with white and we can show the tiger probably don't want to go that crazy let's go down a little bit and we're just gonna show it here there we go and see we can adjust it exactly where we paint because if I just turned on that whole layer it's not gonna give us the result we want but see how we can use a soft edge brush and the brush hardness is here hardness all the way to zero and we can use this soft edge brush to just kind of blend things in a little bit better and get a smoother kind of composite so what I'm kind of showing you here is one of the fundamental foundational tools that you're gonna use for any compositing compositing is when you combine more than one image together let's turn this feather all the way down and what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna take a hard edge brush just to demonstrate and if we go up here I'm gonna take that hardness all the way up watch what happens see how I paint and see how we've got that hard hard edge right there see that in fact why don't I go around here and I'm just gonna do this whole thing with a really hard edge and I'm just gonna go here let me hit the X key so I can paint it away so we're just gonna kind of just kind of follow the shape of your face alright so we've got that Tigers facing in but look how harsh it is it looks like you know this was cut out for pair of scissors and for collaging sometimes that's the desired result but what we're gonna do now watch what happens as I do the feather and let me show you the mask - here's the mask see that as I do the feather it's gonna soften these edges look at this and see how that just blends things in nice and easily if we look at the layer mask up click or out click you can see the edge of that mosque watch what happens to the mosque as I play with the feather see that as I turn it up it just blurs it it softens it in fact now that as I'm painting with this feather on is just gonna keep adjusting it here so let's increase this feather a little bit more and now with the layer selected I can go in with them maybe a smaller brush and I can refine this so I want to have maybe a little bit more of a forehead showing through right now and see what I'm doing I'm just refining it and that feather just makes it so easy to blend this without having to get perfect selections you know it's just to select all these hairs and everything here would be really really hard but notice how that feather just makes it easy now what I want to do is I just want to show a little bit of the texture here from the tiger around the top of her head now so I'm gonna paint with gray now here's a tip and maybe this is a little bit more advanced but I think people are gonna find this really useful so in order to paint that in a little bit as you know a hundred percent white is 100% opaque zero percent white is a hundred percent transparent so black is transparent white is opaque and somewhere in the middle those Gray's show it so if I want to show that through just a little bit so I want to just mostly show the woman underneath and just show a little bit of the tiger which way do you think I would go should we go lighter or darker with the brush remember we're working on that top layer that white makes that layer a hundred percent black makes a zero you got it we're gonna paint with a darker shade of gray to show less of that layer on top and allow more of the layer underneath to come through so what we need to do then is select a dark grey and watch what happens here I could go down and I could choose my black and I've had people ask me this often why don't you just adjust the opacity so just turn it pasady down and paint you know and just find where you want to go and see if what we're doing here just kind of find their but notice what's happening with the SERP acity it's not reducing the stuff above some adjusting to surpass 'ti and it's just I'm trying to get it but I'm not getting anything back in their forehead see that all I'm doing each time I'm painting it I'm painting away more and more of it so it's sort of works well here's the thing I'm just painting with an opaque brush so imagine I'm spraying paint on there and I'm just applying more and more and more paint and each time I do it I just put more and more paint on and it's slowly building it up so if I've got this a 49er percent opacity and I paint that makes it 50 percent transparency but then if I go again it makes it a hundred percent transparent cuz I just applied two strokes almost like an airbrush imagine getting a can of spray paint and then you want to make it less you don't spray more paint on it so here's the thing about using the shade of grey rather than opacity when you use that shade of grey you're given an absolute value so that means that areas that are lighter it's gonna darken them areas that are darker it's gonna lighten them you understand so let me show you so if I go here and I choose 100% opacity and I change the shade of grey here to a dark gray this is about what 15 percent there this is always gonna paint 15 percent look no matter where I go it's painting 15 percent let me just paint up the top there see that 15 percent if I go again notice it's not increasing it it's staying the same now that what that's doing is it's hiding some of this top layer but same thing if I go here if I click here it's 15 percent if I click here it's 15 percent so that's why I choose this shade of grey so now you can do this with a opacity on the brush but if you use a particular shade of grade you're gonna get a much better result so sorry if they've got a little bit more advanced and so there's 15 percent if I wanted to a little bit more let's click on the gray and we're gonna make that gray a little bit lighter once again I want to show more of the tiger remember the tiger is the top layer I want to show more of it I need to make it lighter think of that as a dimmer switch as we turn it up it makes it brighter we show more of that layer okay so let's click there now and notice as I do that now we see more of that tiger coming through oh alright alright you guys still with me we've covered a lot of ground you may need to watch this tutorial more than once it's okay so now I'm just gonna show you one last thing okay so now if you want to get rid of this mask and apply it to here you can right click and you can choose app light layer mask and what that does is it bakes it into the picture see that there's no mask now this is the pixels so for some reason you need to do this and just get everything into one layer and get rid of the mask you can do that let me undo it and we'll turn on the layer underneath so you can see it now the other thing is if you don't want the mask anymore right-click and just choose delete layer mask the mask is gone and that layer is just restored to how it was I'm gonna undo it one more thing masks are not just working on these layers for these pixel layers if we go down and we create an adjustment layer and at some point I'll give you another tutorial on the adjustment layer and so we go here and we create a curves adjustment layer and so we want to give us a little punch and I have other tutorials on curves check them out so we're increasing that punch now I only want to apply it to a certain part of that photograph notice it has a mask as well so let me hit the D key to reset the foreground background colors hit the X key to show black and so this is this adjustment notice the adjustment is there if I want to hide this adjustment you guessed it I'm gonna paint with black and notice as I paint with black it takes that adjustment away look I probably want a soft edge brush for this though there we go and see how that just blends in a little smoother and stuff I want to take that away from there I just paint with black and also if I want to invert this so that means I want to add this adjustment to here and switch it so right now if we hit the Alpha the option key notice we've got the black there and I'll just move in that and if we want to change it because now this adjustment is showing everywhere except for here if I want to swap it where it shows only here and not there I can invert this mask I can hit ctrl command I to invert it or under the properties panel there's also an invert button so watch what happens hit the invert now it swaps it see that the black became white the white became black and now we increase the contrast just on the face and not the background let me hit ctrl I once again to show you see that so we can invert that mask as well so that works on regular masks let me show you down here if we go down here on a mask and I hit ctrl I notice it swaps it out and that's kind of cool too kind of looks like she's wearing it you know like a costume there so we have that option as well just ctrl I or command I will invert that mask and switch the black to white and a white to black so we'll do the opposite and so there are other places where you might see mosques and here when you work with smart objects when you work with things like smart filters and things like that but you're beyond the scope of this training right now you will also see those masks so whenever you see the mask remember they work the same when you paint with white to show that layer you paint with black to hide the layer and masks are simple as that I know there's a lot of information in this tutorial so just stop at the basics you know just knowing the white and black turns the mask on and off and then maybe watch this again a few times and pick up these different fundamentals because once you grasp how these layer masks work its gonna make you so much more efficient in Photoshop and it's gonna enable you to do I love both fun things so anyway guys I'm curious how was this tutorial let me know in the comments if you found this useful if you learned something new if this helped you finally understand masks I hope it did let me know in the comments and also if you're new here to photoshop cafe welcome and consider hitting that subscribe button right now and what does that mean it means that you're gonna get a new tutorial from me every single week and all you need to do is turn on those notifications and it will let you know when I upload those new tutorials and by the way guys if you like this smash the like button into dust stay tuned each week I'm gonna be doing a new beginners tutorial and I'm gonna be uploading those every Friday or Saturday and we'll figure out the best day let me know by the way what you'd like to learn in these beginners tutorials and what days suits you the best also every Tuesday I upload the regular Photoshop tutorial and right now we're doing a Thursday lifestreams at 1 p.m. Pacific time so anyway guys thanks for watching and until next time I'll see you

Channel: photoshopCAFE

Views: 267,042

Keywords: photoshop, tutorial, photoshop tutorial, learn photoshop, how to, photography, colin smith, photoshopcafe, colin smith tutorial, photoshopcafe tutorial, adobe photoshop, layers, beginners, easy, starting photoshop, how to learn photoshop, photoshop made simple, learn layer masks, layer masks made simple, photoshop layer masks for beginners, layermasks, layer masks, hide background, hide forground, inverted mask, layers panel, paint on masks, clipping masks, composite, photoshop art

Id: sbS5oUuGbGY

Length: 32min 10sec (1930 seconds)

Published: Sat May 30 2020