Layer Masks In Photoshop Elements

hi it's Rick from the central Photoshop Elements comm in this video we're going to take a look at layer masks what they are and how you can use them layer masks are another concept that can be really hard to grasp at first so let's face it head-on early in the game here let's go over to elements and get started I'll use the same photo of Carol in New Zealand since we're familiar with it from the first lesson I got an email from Carl the other day and he asked me when when he would be getting his royalty checks from all the videos I've been doing with them I just had to laughs anyway uh let's do a quick recap of the first lesson the important thing to remember is that we created a new blank layer above the background layer by clicking on the create a new layer icon let me drag my layers panel over closer so we can see what's going on I'll make a little bigger again so we clicked on this create a new layer icon and that put a new layer called layer one above our background layer in the layers panel and then we took our brush tool and wrote Carl in & Z on it and we talked about how that's kind of like taking a clear plastic sheet and laying it on top of a photograph and then using a black marker to write on the UM clear plastic instead of the photograph so now at this point if we decide we don't want the writing we have some options three obvious ones are we could just drag that new layer to the trash to get rid of it or two we could click on the eyeball next to it in the layers panel to hide its visibility remember we talked about that or we could use the eraser tool to erase it but layer mask gives us even more options I want to keep his name on the picture but I don't want to have the in and Z included I could get around that in a few different ways but since we're learning about layer masks in this lesson I'll show you how we could deal with it using layer masks first I want to make sure I have the layer that has the writing on it active I can do that by clicking on it in the layers panel next I'll click on the add layer mask icon in the layers panel it's the one that looks like a circle inside of a square so I'll click on that and you can see it added a layer mask to layer one and notice it looks like a big white square that's important as you'll see layer mask can be either white black or gray by default when you click on the add layer mask icon it adds a white layer mask here's how I think about using layer masks it's like erasing part of a layer except you don't get rid of it forever you can get back the part you erased because it's really still there I mentioned something earlier that I want to remind you of I said layer masks can be either white black or grey and here's a rhyme you can memorize that will be very helpful and that is white reveals black conceals when we add a layer mask to a layer it's white now remember part of the rhyme white reveals okay reveals what well it reveals whatever is on the layer that you added it to and since right now the whole layer mask is white its revealing everything on that layer so I want to get rid of part of my writing to do that I'm going to do three things first I'm going to get the brush tool from the toolbox by clicking on it and the second thing I'm going to do is I'm going to click on the thumbnail of the layer mask see now we have two thumbnails for layer 1 one is our layer thumbnail and if I click on that you can see it gets that border around the corners and then we also have our layer mask thumbnail and if I click on that that gets a the border around it and whichever thumbnail has the border around it means that that's the active thumbnail on that layer and we want our layer mask to be active so I'm going to click on that and then the third thing I'm going to do is I'm going to paint over the part I want to hide which is in MZ and voila it's gone it worked now let's look at why that worked for us remember white reveals black conceals just four words but what do they mean well the white and black part are easy those are just two colors but let's think about reveals and conceals ask yourself reveals what and conceals what the answer is that it reveals or conceals whatever is on the layer that it's associated with in this case a layer consisting of three words carl in NZ maybe that's four words but whatever when we first added the layer mask to that layer it was completely white so it revealed all the words then we painted on it with black right where two of the three words were so black conceals in this case meant it concealed the two words we painted over but notice it only concealed what was on that layer it didn't conceal the part of the sky where we painted because that's on a different layer that's on the background layer now one more quick thing I want to show you what if when I'm painting I accidentally paint over some of the words that I don't want mean to paint over like the L and it disappears that's part of the beauty of layer mass I accidentally concealed part of it with black so all I need to do to get it back is to reveal it by painting on it with white the color that your brush tool paints with is determined by the foreground color located at the bottom of the tool box down here there are these two big overlapping squares down there the top one is the foreground color and that's the color that your brush tool paints with by default it's black but you can switch the foreground and background colors by pressing the letter X on your keyboard and I'll do that right now and see how they switch places each time you press X it switches the colors since we need to go back and reveal part of our layer and we remember that white reveals so if the foreground color is black we press X and it switches to white now just paint over the part we accidentally painted black and that part of the layer once again is revealed so let's go up there and paint over that and oops I accidentally painted with white over some of the part that I want to hide so now I'll press X again to switch my foreground to black and I can paint over that to conceal it see how that works if you look at our layer mask you in the layers panel you can see on the thumbnail you can see the black paint in the area where we painted that's probably enough for our brains to take in right now so I'm going to end this video but watch for the next video where we'll do a couple more examples of using layer masks so until then remember white reveals black conceals this is Rick from essential Photoshop Elements comm sane take care

Channel: Rick Peterson

Views: 32,855

Keywords: layer masks, Photoshop Elements, layers

Id: Rc62yCt70b0

Length: 7min 38sec (458 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 26 2012