Layer Masking in GIMP

what's going on everybody this is coach g uh back with another tutorial here and what i want to look at today is layer masks how to apply them and what you could use them for potentially if you look on screen i have two layers open i have a pumpkin layer up top as you see i have my visibility icon up and if i disable that i have a black and white version of that photo underneath it now again clicking that i reveals what i have at the top layer which is a colored version of the pumpkin if i want to apply a layer mask to this specific image i will right click that layer making sure that it's selected and there is the add layer mask option for us i will click it and you will see a dialog box pop up if you're looking here on screen we have white which has full opacity in parentheses and we have black which has full transparency in parentheses i want us to go ahead and select this white option we're going to ignore everything else here we're just going to look at the white full opacity option and click add once you see that happen you will notice a little white box this is our layer mask essentially and white reveals that's what we want to remember white reveals black conceals so white is revealing everything right here which is initially what we had the color image of this pumpkin now if i have this selected you can't really see it right now but there is a white box around it if i select the pumpkin image you see the white box around here so it's very important to remember what is selected so when you go to apply a non-destructive edit which would be a nice mask we're about to make you are painting on the correct object or layer um so when i go to my paint brush tool by either pressing the keyboard shortcut p or finding it in my toolbox over here i will also notice that white is selected as my active foreground color i want to go ahead and switch that to black and so i will reset my colors and by clicking this little box right here and we have black as my active foreground color now what you want to remember like i said is black is going to conceal black will hide what is on screen here it's almost acting as an eraser but it is non-destructive so if i paint you can see the black and white coming through which is the layer underneath and again i'm painting i'm making sure this layer mask is selected i released it and i can see that the black paint has been applied on the mask but obviously there's no black paint on here what the black paint does in effect is you know kind of mask this image where i am painting on okay so let's say that my goal was to have everything except for this log or whatever this thing is and this pumpkin be in black and white so i would obviously need to spend some time masking this image and this paint brush that is selected right here has a kind of a fuzzy edge it's not a full on um you know rough edge just like this one that i've switched to so notice the difference in uh the effect right here it's a very crisp hard edge right and if i go back to this fuzzy mask the it's it's that's a little hard to tell but it is less of an abrupt edge if you want to call it that so um another thing i want you to understand is that this paint brush size obviously you can go to this brush size here and slide it how you see fit but if you want to use the keyboard shortcut uh this might be a little bit more efficient and effective for you so if you look where the p key is on your keyboard there are left and right brackets to the right of that p key on the keyboard so left is going to minimize and i'm holding left right now and it's minimizing the brush size so you can see a much smaller brush if i hold the right or click on the right bracket it's going to increase the brush size allowing more coverage when i go to paint obviously if i'm only going to be painting um these basically everything outside the pumpkin in this log some of the stuff over here i can afford to increase my brush size dramatically just to speed up the process instead of having a small brush about the size of a penny or a dime this is a huge brush now and again if i want to go quicker i can go there's no problem going over here and just increasing it quite a bit and here we are now you see more coverage is being taken care of by that i can go back here and just slide it you know as i see fit and continue working and continue painting this until i get close enough to the object where i know i might start accidentally um erasing more than i want or masking more than i want i should say so what i mean is i'm gonna need to zoom in let's say i'm i'm masking away right and i accidentally go like this obviously you can press ctrl z but um if i switch back to my white paint brush color i can paint back over that and obtain that this is part of being a non-destructive image editing tool because if i were to close this application i'd be able to open it back up and if i wanted to make this gray or black and white i should say that would be no problem i would simply just adjust my mask painting surface now what i'm going to go ahead and do is speed this up and once i return this should be very you know tightly concealed with my mask what you're going to notice is i'm going to be zooming in and as you can see um you have many tools up here but this zoom tool if you just want to press the z button you'll get access to it um there's a plus sign right here that signifies that i'm zooming in the minus sign would signify you see the little minus sign um on my cursor that would signify that i'm zooming out plus zooming in minus zooming out um so those are just some things to remember i'm gonna zoom in oh that's a little bit much so i'm gonna zoom back out two and you know right about there is fine i'm going to speed up this process by taking a break from talking and i will get back with you and discuss what has happened in just a moment [Music] [Music] so [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] all right we're back here and the mask has been fully applied i went ahead and sped things up just for time's sake and for demonstration purposes i got a pretty decent mask around this pumpkin and the log you don't see too many artifacts but i'm sure if i zoomed in there would be some stuff that we could clean up but for demonstration purposes like i said this is a pretty decent job uh easy mask to apply because there was not a whole lot there's no like no hair there's uh no you know leaves or anything that we were getting it was a pretty you know decent shape we were working with so painting over that was no problem at all what you want to remember is there are additional tools you can use such as this free select tool which is what i was using and i was clicking points right there to speed things up and bringing back the point right there to where it lightens up as yellow to make my selection bring up the marching ants which are that right there and i was using my paint tool to paint inside of that but you know that's just uh one of the quick tricks you can do if you don't want to just sit here all day long and paint along the edge but either way it works as long as you have patience time and you are careful with what you're doing always remember white reveals black conceals that is our training for today thanks for watching always if you enjoy the video click like and subscribe peace out you

Channel: Coach G

Views: 7,371

Keywords: GIMP, Layer Mask, Tutorial, Graphics, Editing, Training, CoachG, Coach

Id: cRk3zerdqS8

Length: 11min 16sec (676 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 03 2020