Layers and masks for beginners - Photoshop

[Music] ghetto how you doing Adam Williams here from Easyway photography this is the tutorial that I'm sure you've all been waiting for it is the introduction to the adjustment layers and the basic masking within Photoshop okay it also represents the very first technique in step 3 of our essentials workflow so let's go ahead and open up an image and you'll notice we're still we're using much the same image here this photo of Sugarloaf rock now let's go ahead and introduce ourselves to the adjustment layers now the adjustment layers are found right down the bottom of the layer stack down where we see these icons at the bottom of the layer stack here you'll see there's a circle which is half-black and half-white looks like one of those black-and-white cookies that you might find at the bakery click on that and you'll see all of the adjustment layers that are available to us here now one of the things about Photoshop and one of the benefits of doing this course is the fact that although we have all of these adjustment layers and then if we look over to the left hand side we have all of these tools we go straight to the heart of it and learn the things that we need to learn and don't worry too much about the other thing so for example with these adjustment layers here you can have a play around with them when you like and see what they do but essentially I only use about three or four maybe five of these adjustment layers at most the curves adjustment layer this one here does the vast majority of my adjustments it does all of the darkening all of the lightening and all of the contrast adjustments to my images the other ones I like to use are a hue/saturation adjustment layer that does a lot of my color adjustments and the solid color layer here does a lot of my adding of color into my images and then of course I use a couple of other ones every now and again including well the black and white layer every now and again for black and white images and a couple of other ones I now and again I use color balance and the photo filter and I'll be showing you those a little bit later but for the time being we're going to work on those main adjustment layers which is curves and hue and saturation so let's just click away from that menu for a minute and let that closed down now step three of the essentials workflow is the processing element where we add the wow factor where we process the image to our own personal taste and there's a little bit of structure early on there I like to do the brightness adjustments first so that will be a curves layer or several curves layers in fact and then the contrast adjustments which will again be done using curves layer and then I go and adjust the color which will be the hue and saturation lines the first thing I'm thinking here is we might darken down the top and the bottom of the image now before we do that another little side tip there is three processing elements that help attract the human eye and they are more or less light so lighten or darken more or less contrast so adding or taking away contrast and more or less color they are more light or more contrast or more color will draw the human eye into that particular area and less of those three elements will help those elements fade into the background now our job as photographers is to show our viewers what it was that we found interesting enough to take the photograph in the first place now with this particular image of Sugarloaf the reason I took this photograph was because of this big beautiful gorgeous Island sitting on this rocky coast here so I'm going to be concentrating on highlighting the subject the reason that I took the photograph in the first place and then kind of concealing the rest of the elements to allow that subject to shine and that's kind of a theory that we'll be working on as we work through these workflow steps here so the first thing that I'm thinking is maybe darkening the top of the sky and maybe darken the foreground a little might help to draw out that subject even more so let's move back over to our adjustment layers icon a little black-and-white cookie there click on there and select a curves layer this is our first introduction to our curves line you'll see in the properties menu we have a graph here with a 45-degree line there now that 45-degree line is our adjustment line okay it might look a little complex but it's actually not that bad to lighten and darken replace one point click in place one point in the center of that adjustment line and we can click and drag upwards to lighten the image and click and drag downwards to darken the image now if we accidentally get a series of points on our curve and it makes our image look a little bit wild we can hit the refresh button in the properties menu here just down on the bottom of the properties menu is that refresh button kind of looks like the refresh button of the Internet in fact it says here when I hover reset to adjustment default so if I click that it resets to the starting point now there's another way as well if we happen to get a couple of extra points accidentally we can click and drag them off the graph one at a time okay so that will save us deleting that curves layer if we make a mistake we can just reset or drag those points off now let's go ahead and darken down because we want to darken the top of the sky and maybe foreground as well so one point in the center and we click and drag down when I say down we kind of dragged down into the right so slightly towards this bottom right corner here now how far do we drag down now as you can see there's a grid behind our curves layer here okay and through the center adjustment line there is four squares now I try not to drag down any further in the edge or the corner of that series of third squares if you like now there's a couple of reasons for this number one is if we drag down too far like that you can see the curve crashes into the bottom and that is doing damage to our image it's actually turning all of the pixels from that crash point back to our black point so all the pixels through this region here are now turning pure black okay and a detail free so it's removing detail from our image so generally we try not to crash that into the base there and the same reason if we push too hard on the up side you can see we crash into the top and we returning a lot of our pixels pure white and losing a lot of detail okay so we don't want to push too hard with any one adjustment layer the other reason is really aggressive adjustments are very hard to brush in and blend into our image and make natural make look natural okay so we do several smaller adjustments so if we darken down and then decide we need to darken more we just reproduce that same smaller adjustment okay so just a smallish adjustment like that is about as far as I would ever go if we move down to our curves layer here and we turn the visibility icon on and off you can see that's our background layer before the adjustment and then we've darkened down so if we turn that back on you can see that darkening effect affecting the entire image so it's affecting the entire image there now we only really want that to affect the top and the bottom of our image and this is where our layer mask comes in so let's take a look at the layer mask the layer mask is this little white rectangle which is attached to every adjustment layer okay that little white rectangle there if we think about the layer mask as a window when the window is white or clear we'll call white clear when the window is clear we can see the entire effect moving through onto our image okay so there you go that window is white or clear it's affecting every single element of our image every area of our image because the entire window is white now if we hold down command on a Mac or ctrl on a PC and press I for invert you'll see our last goes from white to black okay now when our window is painted black you can't see through a window that's painted black so the adjustment layer is not able to be seen through that black window you can see I turn that on and off that adjustment layer is having no effect but it's still there you can see up here in our properties panel you can still see that darkening effect we just can't see that because our window has been painted black we can't see through black wingnuts so let's go about bringing through the effect in certain areas by cleaning the window with a white brush so let's select our brush our brush is one two three four five six seven our eight tool down in the menu or you can press B for brush on the keyboard and I'll just quickly run through this brush I know there is a separate brush tutorial but we'll just explain this quickly to here now the brush works in conjunction with the palette which is these three icons here you can see we have a big black and white square here and then up to the left a smaller black and white square and off to the right we have a double sided switch arrow now the big black and white square you can see I've got black on top of white the square on top represents the color that is on the brush currently and the square on the bottom represents the color on the palette which we can switch with the brush at any time using the little switch arrow icon here or we can also use X on the keyboard as a shortcut okay see those switching there the little icon up to the left the smaller version of the black and white squared will set the default colors to pure white and pure black if we click on that well it doesn't really show you much it just showed you white on top of black now if you happen to have another colour on your palet red green blue purple orange you get the idea you just click that little default icon and it will reset to pure white and pure black now something interesting within Photoshop is the fact that we always use either pure white or pure black on our brush I never use any color on my brush whatsoever of course I add color to my images that we add color via an adjustment layer and then mask it in with an either white brush or a black brush okay that will start making much more sense as we move through okay so that's our palette for the time being we want white on top of black okay so you can get that either by pressing the default icon there or by using X on the keyboard to switch between black and white moving up to our top brush menu settings here we have the little drop menu where it says the size line currently reads 300 click on that and you can see we have a whole series of brushes here in the brush menu if you scroll to the top you can just choose the very first brush to the left there and that will give you the same brush that I have and it also should set our hardness level to zero okay so you can see if my hardness was on something else and I clicked that very first brush my hardness is set to zero the size is relatively irrelevant right at this point it doesn't really matter I'll show you how to adjust that an easier way in a minute just make sure your hardness is set to zero and then click back on that menu to close down we want our mode to be on normal from this drop menu so make sure your mode is on normal and then our opacity and flow is kind of interesting and you'll see a little bit more detail about this in the brush tutorials but basically I set my flow to 50% and pretty much leave at this and the majority of the time and then opacity generally between about 15% and 50% but my go-to is around 30 or 40 let's set up at around 30% opacity so now okay we're pretty much all set up and ready to go the final thing we need to do is set the size of our brush and we do that using a square bracket keys which are over near the return or Enter key on your keyboard the right-hand one will make the brush bigger left hand one will make the brush smaller we want a rather large brush here you can see up here 700 pixels that's roughly what I would like to use and let's also reduce the size of the image to give us a little bit of space to brush outside of the image if you like because we want to sort of take our brush strokes right outside the image either side and I don't really have the room to do that just yet so press and hold down command or control and then click the minus key on the keyboard okay so something like that now let's get back to the Mars as we said when the mask was white we could see the effect coming through we've inverted the master black we can't see any effect of that darkening at all so if we start cleaning our window with our white brush here you'll see that effect it begin to come back through now I'm just going to sweep along the top of the image by clicking and holding down sweeping and then letting go and repeating that process click like click and hold like go and you won't see much happening the 30% opacity comes through relatively slowly if you look at the mask here you can see the mask is started to turn white at the top which is exactly what we want and if we now turn off the visibility of this particular layer you will see that the effect of that darkening is affecting image along the time okay now let's use that same white brush and bring that effect through the foreground a little bit here there's a little light area there we might darken that just clicking and dragging the two brush techniques I prefer click and drag and let go so swiping click and drag and let go or dabbing which is just single brushstrokes dabbing into the area we want okay there the two techniques I prefer now if we go ahead and hold down option or alt and click on our mouse you can see that's what we've done to our mouse the areas that are white means that 100% of our adjustment layer effect are affecting or coming through onto the image the areas that are pure black lean that zero descent of that darkening effect coming through and you can see those areas of transition where a percentage of the effect is coming through just click on the blank space of that layer to return to normal viewing and if we turn the visibility of this darkening layer on and off now notice that the darkening effect is only coming through where the window is clean and white let's go ahead and repeat that I think we could darken the top of that sky down even a little bit more so back down to our black and white circle up and select a curves layer one point in the middle of that curve and then click and drag down to the bottom right like so now making sure that our layer mask is selected now this is something that you normally don't need to worry about because by default the layer mask is selected and you can tell by those little white kind of selection brackets around the mask there but every now and then the adjustment layer icon gets selected like so and our mask won't work so just making sure that our mask is selected we press command or control + I to invert the mask we do that every time we apply the adjustment we invert the mask and then we paint it in with our soft white brush so using that same brush at 30 percent opacity and 50 percent flow we can just swipe again from side to side you can see that's really darkening the top of that layer nicely if you see any kind of light spots you can just kind of dab them in okay and try and get that gradient nice and smooth that looks great I think I'll leave the foreground as is so this particular mask you can see has now turned white at the top if I hold down option or alt we can have a quick look there it is there so the darkening effect is mainly coming through the extreme top and none at all is coming through the black at the bottom just revert to normal viewing there by clicking that blank space and if we turn the visibility of this layer on and off you will see that the darkening effect is only coming through the mask window where it is white now go ahead and lighten up our subject a little bit but to add a little bit more brightness to our subject so again a curves layer back down to our adjustment layer icon select curves once more and this time we place one point in the middle at this time we drag up and to the left slightly like so just a little bit just keeping my eye on that subject there whilst I do this I don't want to push too far this is just a little bit yeah just like that once again command or control and I flip invert will turn that window black and conceal the effect of that adjustment layer and now let's reveal using our white brush so black conceals white reveals so using our white brush I'm just going to dab a little bit over our subject there nice and soft like so okay once again you'll notice our mask has turned to a light gray they're allowing a percentage of that effect to come through and you can see the effect when I click the visibility icon on and off that's before and then that light effect is coming through in that specific region just like so before and after lightening up that subject a little bit okay so I'm pretty happy with my brightness adjustments for the time being let's move on to contrast now of course you could name all of these layers if you wanted but it's also fairly easy just to turn them off and see what they're doing let's move on to our contrast adjustment again we move down to our adjustment layer icon and again we select curves contrast is a little bit different we're going to use two points one point to darken the darks and one point to lighten the lights as essentially that is what contrast is darkening the darks and lightining the lights so again looking at the grid that we have behind the curves layer here you can see the very first square in the bottom left I'm going to place one point where that square intersects my adjustment line there and let's sign up the top with a last square intersects the adjustment on there now the very first point that we placed is closer to the black point here you can see that black point so in this one we're going to use to darken the dark we drag that down a little bit because darkening is dragging down I got down ever so slightly just really just breaking the line that's all we need to do and the point up the top here which is closest to the whites we push that in an upwards direction ever so slightly just like so and you can see the overall effect of this particular curves layer if we turn that icon on and off before and then a bit of a contrast boost laughter once again we invert our window to black so hold down command or control and press I to invert and contrast is a very powerful attractant to the human eye so we're mainly going to paint this on our subject so using that same soft white brush just dab a few times and swipe a few times on our subject here okay again you can see our mask as a big white blob in the middle that's because we're just adding the contrast to our subject at this point you can probably do a little bit of contrast elsewhere maybe one or two swipes just like so and you can see that effect is mainly adding to our subject okay so I don't think we need a lot more contrast I think the one adjustment layer there on this image is enough let's move on to adjusting our color so we've adjusted the brightness we've adjusted our contrast now let's adjust our color so moving back to our adjustment layers icon click on there and this time we're going to choose hue/saturation you can see in our properties panel we have a different menu okay so let's take a look we have a hue slider we have this use slider first of all I don't find a lot of use for the hue slider but we will look at this use slider a little bit later in the accelerator as you a cause okay so just reset that back to the zero down the very bottom we have a lightness slider and to tell you the truth I've never found the use for this whatsoever I find there's much better ways to lighten and darken an image then using the lightness slider in the hue/saturation panel here reset that to zero also and then of course we have the main slider the most useful slider in this particular section the saturation slider moving to the left we remove all of the color moving to the right it gets completely wild and out of control as you can see here now generally as I just reset that to zero as we process our image via curves layers lightening and darkening and adding contrast it tends to saturate the image anyway let's turn off all of those and see if you can see what I mean okay so there was our starting point I turn on all of those layers you can see the colors are much more vibrant and saturated than what they were before so a lot of the time when I get to the hue saturation color adjustment of my workflow here a lot of the time I'm desaturating we might in this case just saturate the main island there Sugarloaf Rock just a little bit so let's look at just doing that first of all let's just grab the saturation slider and just turn that up a little like so that's that seems like plenty and then press once again command or ctrl I to invert and turn that window black concealing that effect using our soft white brush we can reveal that saturation effect again mostly on our subject there to help draw our viewers eye into the subject once again you can see before and then after just a subtle increase in color before after let's move back down to our adjustment layer icon and select another hue/saturation layer this time I'm thinking we might just desaturate some of the Blues out of the sky in this particular image the way we do that or the easiest way to do that is load it up to the menu where it says master so if we click on that master menu you can see we can adjust all of the colors individually if we click on blues and then slide that saturation slider most of the way to the left that minus 70 there you'll see that's taken a lot of bloom out of the image however not all of the bloom has gone and that's because the cyan channel also contains a lot of those kind of blue colors that you find in the sky and the water for that matter so cyan will click on that and move that down to around minus 70 also now you can see the effect that layers having by removing all of the blue but leaving the rest of the colors relatively untouched which is pretty cool ok so once again command or control I invert that layer to hide that effect away and then using our brush and just go ahead and swipe across the sky and just reduce some of the blue from the sky then okay just a little bit like so that's pretty much all I want to do there now that's the main core section of our workflow as I said we adjust brightness first then contrast and then color and the reason for that is as you've seen as I demonstrated before is because color is affected by those previous brightness and contrast adjustment so we don't want to adjust color first because we'll then potentially have to adjust it again later once we do the brightness and contrast adjustments for the time being I'll leave it here because essentially I just wanted to explain the basic adjustment layers and the basics behind masking which essentially is make your adjustment invert the window to black and then paint in where you want that effect with a white branch I hope that makes a lot of sense and I'm sure you'll pick that up really quickly thank you for watching along and I look forward to seeing you in the next tutorial bye for now [Music]

Channel: Adam Williams Creative

Views: 181,034

Keywords: Layers and masks for beginners, Photoshop Layers and masks for beginners, Layers and Masks for Photoshop Beginners, Beginner Layer Masks Photoshop, Layers and Masks, Photoshop Layers, Layers, Photoshop beginners, beginner photoshop, Easy Photoshop, Easy Way Photography, Photoshop for Landscapes, Easy Way Photoshop, how to use photoshop, Beginners, photoshop tutorial, Photography, Photoshop Masks, Photoshop Masking, How to Layer mask, Photoshop Layers and Masks for beginner

Id: 78ZIqyA9YN0

Length: 30min 18sec (1818 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 27 2017