Photoshop Essentials: Layers & Masks

hi I'm Tony Northrop n for my Photoshop video training series of want to cover the essentials of layers and masks specifically for photographers so I'm starting out in Lightroom here you can see I have a nice picture of Stockholm but the sky is kind of washed out and the foreground here is way too dark looking at the histogram you can see the exposure is good this is a raw file unedited the exposure is good all the data is captured there but it's not being presented very well first thing I'm going to do is make another copy of this we're going to get two layers of masks in just a second I just want to show you one of my favorite tricks which is combining a picture with itself so now that I have two copies of the same image one virtual copy I'm going to bring this first one into the develop module and for this one I'm just going to make this sky look nice so this guy's a little bright right now I'm just going to bring the exposure down you can see oh there's so much nice color and texture in the sky and it's just much more as how I remembered it so I might also bring the vibrance up a little bit just bring the colors more to the way I remember them because it was just a beautiful sunset this day so let's crank those colors up a little bit that's looking pretty good maybe I'll bring the whites up just a hair okay so popping back to the second now that I have one picture with this sky that looks good now let's make this foreground look good because you can see it's just way too dark here so I'm just going to crank the whole exposure up there you go maybe I'll drop the blacks a little bit I still want plenty of contrast in there let's see maybe a little bit of clarity here so now I've got two copies of the same picture you can see one has a great sky one is a great foreground I'm going to select them both right click and then edit in and then go down to open as layers in Photoshop it's going to handle the creation of the layers automatically for me it's just going to stack those two copies of the exact same picture over in the right part of the Photoshop window here by default we see the two layers and right now there's layer 0 okay there we go it's adding in the second layer as we speak it's an automated process of doing that if you don't see the layers panel down there it can disappear go to the window menu and then select layers so now both the images here are stacked but we only see the one image with the sky and that's because a layer will hide any layers that are underneath it so they're both in there but the second layer is completely hidden I can show the underlying layer by clicking this eye here whenever this eye is visible in the layers section then that layer will be visible so by clearing that that layer becomes invisible revealing the underlying layer if I were to clear both of course we see this checkerboard pattern which indicates nothing is there now if I wanted to I could resize one of these I hit ctrl T which opens up a transform and then you know I could resize it and this kind of lets us see that there really are two pictures stacked on top of each other of course we don't want that so I'll hit escape to cancel it now the trick is showing the right parts of each of the two pictures and there's one way to do this without using masks and it's not a good way but I'll show you there's the eraser tool over here so as I select that razor tool and I'm going to hit right bracket to make my brush really big I can just erase that top layer and I could just go in here and erase it but what if I screw up and I just go way too far what do I do now well it's not that easy because the eraser is not so easily reversible if I were to save it and reopen it I wouldn't be able to undo it so instead of going to hit ctrl Z to undo that instead of using kind of a permanent tool like the eraser I can use masks which allow me to choose which part of each layer is visible in which parts are hidden so I don't know why they make these icons so tiny but you'll see this one way down here is the layer mask icon so with that top layer selected I'm going to hit that icon and nothing changed right it added a mask here and you can see there's a little link indication so this picture is linked to this mask and the mask is all white so if I hold down the Alt key and I hit that I see my mask which is all white so I'll hide that again now what we can do with the mask is paint over the mask to make parts of it black so I'm going to use just a brush tool I'm literally just going to be drawing blackness over it and then I'm going to make it black by just hitting this double arrow thing here this this shows you the color that you're painting right now this white block there so by switching them I switch the white for the black and now I'm thing black just by way of example if I were to paint black over the sky that's what I would get but I don't want to paint over the picture I want to paint over the mask so now any place I paint in the mask I'm going to be showing the underlying layer so there you can see I'm revealing the underlying layer so let's undo that and now our task is to do a good job of painting the mask so that everything looks really nice and this part gets pretty complex because selecting in Photoshop is such a challenge that there are people whose careers are just creating good selections there are people who work in big photo editing houses who just are experts at selecting things that it's an amazing that that's how big of a job it is but there are tools that make it pretty easy for you and my favorite tool is the quick selection tool this works better than just about anything else and with the quick selection tool what I want to do now is I'm just going to go in and select the foreground here just as best as I can and you can see it's not being perfect like I'm going to rough it and then I'm going to go back and refine it a little bit better these areas were it did a bad job I'm going to hit the Alt key and click in there just to on select those parts so without holding down the Alt key we'll add it to the selection and when you hold the Alt key it will remove it from the selection so I'm removing these unwanted parts and right now this is just a selection so I could just delete all of this but rather than do that what I'll do instead is use the masking so you know as long as we have that selection here I'm going to show you a trick I'm going to delete that layer mask by right-clicking and with this selection enabled I'm going to hit layer mask here and it will automatically create a layer mask for me however it did it backwards so I'm going to hit ctrl Z and I'll go to select menu and then I'm going to inverse which you could also do shift control I so now the selection is inverted by create a layer mask you can see that's pretty good it did a pretty good job of masking that now with this sort of manual selection I obviously this was kind of roughed in and I didn't spend the time to try to refine it but still it doesn't quite have a natural look what you see are very harsh transitions and those kinds of indicators will tell the eye that the image has been post-process and that's something we always want to avoid with an image obviously post-processing it we could just run this through an HDR tool if we didn't mind it looking post-process we wanted to look natural so let's forget this mask let's forget carefully selecting everything because when you do that it's always going to end up imperfect especially if you have trees one of those common problems I see with landscape photos that somebody tried to replace the sky but there but the selections are bad or the leaves are bad and a tree because they're just too fine so let's just get rid of this mask so now I have the gradient tool selected and create a mask so first we're just going to look at the mask and as I draw the gradient tool you can see wherever I click first it draws the foreground color and wherever I end clicking it draws the background color and it does a nice transition from one to the other so I actually want the top part to be white and the bottom part to be black so I did that backwards because I forgot I switch these tools so I'm going to switch back to black and white here so now it's white here in black here and let's display this so I know exactly where to click I'm just going to smoothly transition from the background to the foreground right about here and up I painted on the main mask and the main layer let's select the mask there and redo it okay so that looks pretty good but you can see it still looks pretty obvious there's some pretty obvious halo in here around the building just because the gradient was too rapid I didn't spread the gradient over a big enough area so let's undo that and we'll try it again okay this is getting better and better I think let's see the gradient is always going to be at a right angle to the line that I draw okay so here this is looking pretty good I think and if I wanted to do any fine-tuning I certainly could do it by just editing this mask here in fact they do because as I hide this layer you'll see that the balloon looks way better in the more brightly exposed picture than it does in the underexposed picture so I'm going to try to get this mask taken from the bottom layer here and I'm going to do that by using the layer mask here this will show you this just the layer mask and I'm going to just paint black over where the balloon is so it shows through and shows me the bottom layer anytime you want to see the layer mask just as a reminder hold down your Alt key or your option key on a Mac and click that layer mask that just reveals what it actually looks like so now we have the task of trying to select around this balloon and as we showed you before selecting kind of be kind of difficult so I hit ctrl alt 0 to zoom in 1 to 1 and I'm holding on the spacebar and using that to pan over to this balloon look at that vignette engaging but chromatic aberration okay so now we're going to try to select the balloon the gradient tool' probably won't work here because it's just too small of an object I've selected it and I need to refine the selection a little bit so I'm going to go to the selection tool and then select refine edge and this allows Photoshop to use some of its smarts to make it looked a little bit better so I I like to do the edge detection a little bit and just increase the radius and a little bit of feathering will really help out here - a little smoothing might help as well okay so you can see it's showing me just the parts that are selected everything else is blanked out if I want to see the original I can click that checkbox I can also change the view here to see it viewed in different ways this is these are just different ways to see the selection that you're currently working on so singing on white it looks pretty good to me here so I'm going to go ahead and click OK now I've got just the balloon selected what I'm going to do is just fill this area in the selected area with the Paint Bucket or you know even easier I'll just use the brush and just paint black really big Oh I'm need to paint in the layer mask you'll make that mistake too so let's paint black that I'm painting white switch back to black okay so now I'm finally painting black in the layer mask and you can see that bottom layer is shining right through there we go so I can't control D to deselect and just just to hide those marching ants a little bit so we zoom as we zoom back out I'm going to hit control Z to fill the screen with it you can see it looks pretty good and I can look at the layer mask by alt clicking the layer mask and you can see my gradient here and the black part that I carved out of it but it looks a little unnatural right so ctrl alt Z to zoom in one-to-one again and I'll just pan over and it looks unnatural because too much of the edge is shining through so that chromatic aberration is super bright against the dark sky and it just it looks unnatural because it is unnatural all right but with masks it's really easy to paint back just a little bit more so I'm going to I want to show I want to paint the mask white right because I want to show more of the sky and less of the balloon so I'm going to set this to white and I'm going to use a brush here and I want to just touch it up a little bit just barely touch the edges of it and you get really used to kind of just touching up your masks like this and you want to just be real sensitive and if you if you screw up and you go too much hit the X key the X key is a keyboard shortcut to switch between the white and the black here so now I'm painting black again and it makes it real easy just to go back and repaint something that I screwed up there'll be just lots of back-and-forth as you're kind of perfecting your mask and don't be afraid to zoom in past one to one like I just did so let's go back to painting and white and I'll just touch this up a little bit I'm even going to I want to soften my brush up some so I could do that by selecting a bigger brush or by reducing the hardness here just to make a softer edge something looks more like this then something that looks like that and that'll just make it a little more gentle so again painting white just to remove some of those edges if your brush is too heavy if you find yourself oversteering kind of take the opacity and just dial it way down and this will make your adjustments much more gentle so I'm going to dial that down to 27% just want to make sure all that kind of fringing has gone there just be as gentle with it as I can so this is just kind of blending those two layers together a little bit better so it ctrl Z to zoom out and it's not perfect I could spend some more time refining that but you can see it's looking pretty good and it's certainly looking better than either of the original pictures and so that's our before and this is our after and you can see it's by far better but I want to do one more thing I want to add in one more layer by throwing a moon in there okay that could be way too much right but still it'll be an interesting exercise for using layers and masks for something different in Photoshop I'm going to hit ctrl W to close that and then save it and that will import it back into Lightroom and hitting G to jump back to the grid view you can see my original picture here so I'm going to take this picture of a moon and my new edited picture and I'm going to open them as layers just as they did for all right so this is looking real natural right and nobody would notice that this was comped tell you what let's actually replace that balloon with the moon and the way I'll do that is I'm first I'm going to just remove the balloon entirely so there's this really cool tool called content-aware fill and I'll start by let's put a nice little feather a 3d pixel feather that just softens the edge first I'm just going to select around this balloon now press shift and backspace to bring up the fill tool and you can see it gives me a couple of options but the one I want is content-aware so let's go ahead and do content-aware fill and you can see photoshop does a pretty good job of just removing the balloon completely from the sky so now let's show our moon picture once again and let's move the moon right where that balloon was this moon is pretty huge but we'll deal with that in a second one way to get rid of the black around the moon would be to use our quick selection tool here and select it and then either create a mask or just delete it that still looks a little bit unnatural but I'll show you an even easier way to do it because the background hitting ctrl Z to step back in time because the background is black we can use layer blending which is a very useful tool for photographers allowing you to blend multiple layers together you can experiment with these there's things like lighten and screen the screen tool is going to work pretty well for us here and that anything in a screen that's black disappears completely so all that darkness just kind of faded out now this certainly looks better than it did when we had the screen type set to normal right so setting that to screen looks much better it's still a bit much though because the moon is showing up in front of the atmosphere and it should be behind the atmosphere and the clouds and an easy way to adjust that is to just drop the opacity down so I'm going to grab the opacity here and if I set it to zero it disappears completely so anything in between just kind of fades the moon in and will just give us a more natural look so you want to just kind of adjust that this just allows the atmosphere to kind of show above the moon now of course that's a bit too big so we can scale the moon down and the way I'm going to do that is by transforming that layer so with this layer selected I'm going to hit ctrl T and that brings up the transformation so now I could scale it up or down to make sure you don't end up with a big egg-shaped moon hold down the shift key the shift key locks in the proportions of your transformation to make sure that it keeps the same aspect ratio so one of the biggest mistakes people make is they make the moon way too big in these comps this was taken at like 30 millimeters maybe which would mean the moon would be like yay big we could probably go a little bit bigger than that but we don't really want to overdo it too much or we'll just risk having it look completely unrealistic so I'll hit the enter key to lock in that transformation so please don't take this as me telling you to to photoshop moons in every landscape that would be silly I just wanted to demonstrate the usefulness of using layers and masks to photographers these are capabilities that just aren't built into lightroom but the power of photoshop makes it very easy to do and if I save this file I can go back and edit it later and those layers will still be intact along with all the masks so if you decide you wanted to mask something slightly differently you wouldn't have to go back and recreate everything layers a mass stay intact as long as you save the file as a tiff or PSD for more for videos like this be sure to subscribe and give us a like and share it with your friends go to know more about photography check out stunning digital photography and we don't have a Photoshop book out yet but it will be out soon so in the meantime you can read our Lightroom books thanks so much

Channel: Tony & Chelsea Northrup

Views: 210,036

Keywords: photoshop, Adobe Photoshop (Software), comp, composite, layer, mask, layers, masks, graduated

Id: Gz7tv1OJajk

Length: 20min 14sec (1214 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 27 2015