Layer Masking - GIMP 2 8 - Tutorial

okay doing a quick demonstration for a letter masking open the software 2.8 this year and then we're going to add in a picture so I'm just heading off to where I keep my pictures and finding a woman a big hair and in she goes okay so the purpose of layer masking is to make sure that if we have something with a lot of fine details such as hair and that we're able to keep that detail and we couldn't possibly get in with a the brush in and save each one of these individual hairs and these gaps and stuff in here so we're going to use layer masking to take care of that detail so first step is to bring the picture in second step is to add a transparency to that layer so I'm adding a transparency then we are going to duplicate the layer so back up to layer and duplicate layer so if we come over and look at layers we've got our background layer and then we've got our mask that we're going to build up here so I'm just going to double click on that change that to mask so I know that that ones that hit my Enter key and have that there in place make sure you have that layer selected so over here on the right select that layer and go into your colors and you want to desaturate so we're going to turn that to black-and-white first or I should say grayscale and we're going to say okay to that and now we have D saturated we're going to go back into colors and into brightness and contrast and what we're trying to do is we're going to try to make things as black and white as possible I'm going to bring up my brightness up to about 50 on this I want to try to keep my whites white and my darks extremely dark but I don't want to lose the detail in the hair if I go too far this way you can see that right in here I lose a bit of hair right here I'm gapping on the hair I don't want to lose any of that there or over here so I need to be careful of that so I'm just going to pull back my brightness level a little bit or my contrast level until I can see the maybe the hair fill in there so it's a kind of a balancing act I'm trying to keep that level of detail I can see it coming back in coming back in and I might have to take it maybe all the way down to maybe a 35 something like that again you can play with your brightness and your darkness and we're playing around with the levels there to see if we can get that to fill in nicely alright I'm going to click on OK on that once we get that in place I'm going to keep in mind that anything that when we layer masks anything that is black will disappear anything that is white will be kept so what we want to get rid of is all of this stuff here so we're going to head off to basically do a do an inversion here so with this little this selected we're going to go to colors and then I'm going to do an invert so again remember anything that is white is kept so her hair and all of these little pieces here will be kept and all these are the black gaps and things that you see here will disappear unfortunately we're also going to lose her face as well so what we want to do there is we want to grab a paintbrush and we're going to swap our foreground and background colors with these two little arrows here and what I'll do is I'll use my paintbrush I'll grab a solid brush and I'm going to increase my brush size and I'm just going to start painting white and whatever I paint white as well as the things that are already white in the picture will be kept so I want to keep her face so I'm going to paint that white and I want to keep her chin and neck in that area there maybe even some of this detail right here and I'm just trying to stay a little bit away from the outside of her hair because that's where the fine detail is and taking that so anything that is white again we are we are keeping perfect once we have that in place we're going to go edit and we'll cut that so we've just cut that layer you can see from up here that that layer has now disappeared and here's where we're going to add the layer masking part so under layer we're going to layer and mask add layer mask and you can see over here in the dialog box that says white full opacity and basically what that means anything that is white in our mask will keep anything that is black we will see through so we're going to add that and you can see right here it adds this little masking to the picture so what we want to do is we want to copy and paste that picture that we had previously just cut and put on our clipboard so we're going to paste it there so make sure that you select right here you want to go edit and we want to paste and we just paste and what you notice is anything that was black has disappeared and anything that was white has been kept so that works out for us there's a couple little areas in here that I might have maybe should have left alone but for now we're okay now what we want to do is we want to anchor these two things together we have this floating section and this here so right click here anchor that into place and now you can see how our masking works anything that's white will be capped anything that is black will disappear so for example if I still have my paintbrush if I paint with paint with white you'll see that things will start to come back see the background coming back in there and you can kind of see up on my mask that when I paint with white it keeps that area I don't want to do that so I'm going to spend a little control Z undo what I just did but you do notice I have a couple of areas here that I don't necessarily want to keep so I could make my brush smaller and go in and take those out but I'm just going to leave them for now so if we're happy with the results of that and again you can see that we have all this fine detail we didn't have to go in with an eraser and erase all in these areas here to keep the detail in our hair we can now go in and put in a different background in behind that that picture so I'm happy with that let's say that I want to go and grab and put in a different background first of all I should find out where the size of this picture is so I'm going to go into my images and look at my image properties my image properties tell me if this picture is fairly large 2560 by 1600 pixels that might be hard-pressed to find a good background to fit against that so I could reduce the size of this so maybe what I'll do is I'll scale this picture down first so I'll go into image scale image and I'm going to reduce it to maybe let's go with an 800 here and scale that down let's hit enter it's locked and in proportion with my lock maintained here scaling it down perfect and now I'm going to go find a background that might fit that so I'll head off to Google and let's see if we can do a search up in here in in Google there we go and I'll look for now let's go with sunset a nice sunset and here we go with the sunset we'll search our images and let's make sure that our sunset image is larger than 800 which is the size that we picked so I've got one that's 1024 by 768 so here's a number of sunsets that could work for me I'm going to take this one right here Niagara Falls and I'm going to go to the full-sized image there's the full sized image I'm going to right click and I can either save the picture I'll save it so that you guys can redo this one so I'll save the picture as I'll put it back in the same folder and this one is Niagara Falls sunsets there and there save it back in there and then I can open this and copy that background into place so here's my Niagara Falls sunset I'll drag and drop that into this picture there it goes and I need to make it go in underneath so I'll just pull this layer down and now you can see that that layer is in behind our model you can see the sunset shines nicely through the different portions of her hair there and there you have it so we can once we're happy with that again I would save that as an X C F file because I want to maintain our layers so I could save that file and do a save as and I could call this one model and sunset I'll save that in the same location and then I could export that so my client could take a look at it to see whether or not my client liked that that image I'll do a file this time I will export so I'm going to export to the same location has some transparency in it so I might want to save it as a ping and this could be my version one going up to my client and I will export and say it keep the defaults export and that file is now saved in that folder if I want to check to see what that ping file looks like I can go in here and here's my picture double click on it and there's what the final product looks like so there you have it there's layer masking again you might want to go in and do some touch-ups on around some of the hair there you can see that we do have some stray pix Ling and things like that you can always go back because we maintained and save that as an x EF or a project file we can go back in and touch up some of that here now that I see it and how it looks in here alright hope that was helpful

Channel: Kevin Legault

Views: 370,967

Rating: 4.85851 out of 5

Keywords: GIMP layer masking tutorial lesson

Id: Jle81ofRLok

Length: 12min 57sec (777 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 15 2013