Photoshop Layers and Masks for beginners

in this video I want to talk about layers and layer masking now we're going to keep it really simple so if you're fairly new to photoshop and you find layers and masking a little bit complicated then this is going to be absolutely perfect for you let's get going [Music] hey everyone this is Dean thanks so much for dropping by to watch this video now today we're talking about layers and layer masking so I'm going to break this up into some different segments we're going to talk about the difference between a pixel layer and an adjustment layer we're going to talk about how layers work and interact with each other we're going to talk about transparency in a layer blending modes very briefly and we're also going to talk about how to add a mask to a layer and then how to edit that mask or paint in and out now what I'm doing with this one is I'm going to timestamp it so if you go back to the description you'll see each of these points will be time stamped and you can jump to that at any stage that'll be good if you want to come back later on and have another look at the video okay so let's start off with just explaining to you the difference between a pixel layer and an adjustment layer okay so think of your image as a pixel layer because it's obviously full of pixels the other type of pixel layers that we have would be a text layer or it could be a solid fill layer solid color fill that would be a pixel layer as well now what you need to think about with a pixel layer is that it's solid okay you cannot see through it so we could have a couple of different layers we could have our base layer and then we may have duplicated this layer to sit on top okay and now with layers treat it as a stack and you're always looking down onto the stack this is really important that you understand the way we've the way we visualize layers so we're always looking down and as I said a pixel layer is solid so you cannot see through it so you can't actually see the image underneath so that's a pixel layer now the other type is an adjustment layer so this is non pixel non pixel based so there's no pixels in this is it's just a container that holds the the command that we want to apply to it so this one here is a contrast adjustment layer now I hope you really enjoy my high-tech approach to this if you are leave me a comment so here we could have our base layer we've duplicated a layer that we're going to edit and then we would add an adjustment layer on top in this case a contrast layer so as we look down through the stack we can see the contrast layer sitting on top of this layer now adjustment layers always interact with the first pixel layer underneath it okay and the beauty with these is you can add multiple adjustment layers so this one's a black and white one so you can have you know as many as you want sitting on top of each other and because they're not pixel based and because they are transparent then they see through each other and they just supply that command to the layer underneath now if we had this setup here and then if we added another pixel-based layer on top then remember this is solid so that blocks out everything underneath and we cannot see through so if that was the case our picture on our screen would look like that because this one is blocking out what's underneath it okay so hopefully that all makes sense now the other type of layer that we can have could be a selection so what if we made a selection on this layer and then we wanted to cut that out and sit that on top so just let me do that again I'm going real high-tech here so we've made our selection and then command J okay and then we've cut that light out of here and it's now sitting as its own layer quite often we do this there may be an area that we want to work on well we may be bringing something in from another image this may have been brought in from another shot where the light was better on the rail whatever you get the get the point so what happens now is this is what our stack looks like this one's on top and of course if we haven't moved it and as we view it it's exactly where it was and when we start to move there layer that layer that we've cut out then we will see it in a different position so again you just got to think of this as your stack of layers and we're always looking down from the top okay that's it for here I'm going to now jump into Photoshop and I'll show you the rest of the points okay so here we are in Photoshop we've got our image of Craig's Hut up and the first off I want to show you the layers palette so this is the layers palette here now if yours is not showing just go to window come down and click on layers and that will show it here now I've got these icons set to large so it may be easier for you to to do that so we just come in here and go down to power options and just select a larger icon and that'll make that bigger for you a little bit easy to see what's going on okay so let's a do a walk around of this layers palette I'm not going to go through absolutely everything because we don't use everything in here but basically here we have our layer so this shows our layer we have a lock and we have an eyeball here that we can turn that layer on and off now up here we have a blending mode and opacity fill and then these ones down here we have this little icon here as a shortcut to add an effect to a layer could be a text effect to drop shadow or something like that this one here is to apply a mask this one here is for our adjustment layers so it's telling you about the adjustment layers these are all here and the next one is a folder so we can actually group layers so if we end up with an image that has lots and lots of layers and it's getting a bit messy we can group some together and rename that folder and this one here this just adds and creates a new empty layer and of course we have a trash bin to get rid of all the rubbish okay that's the layers palette so let's just have a look at this image I'll just sort of replicate what I did with the with the cards so this is a single layer it's just one layer and it's a pixel layer so that's solid now command J just duplicate the layer so now we can see we've got two layers one sitting on top of the other okay let me cut that fence out I'll just make a selection command J so now the third layer here we've got that cut out selection okay so we can see it there sitting on that top layer now when you see a checkerboard effect that means that that is empty or transparent so there's no no detail or no pixels there so in effect that will see through and reveal what's underneath it now there's no difference here in the picture because everything's sitting where it should be if I just grab the move tool so I've got this layer selected the one that we cut out and now if I move that you can see that it moves around and we can place it wherever we want and again just remember we're looking from the top of the stack coming down so we can see that now if I move this out of place and then if I move this layer on top of that one now we don't see the one out underneath that's out of place because this is a solid layer and it's blocking that one there off okay let me get rid of that layer now I quickly show you an adjustment layer so if we go in here we'll just add a saturation layer so when we add an adjustment layer we have the adjustment here so that's on the left so that's this panel here a hue and saturation and then it automatically applies a mask so if we go into saturation here and just decrease it and that is now applying that effect to the layer underneath and as I said earlier we could have multiple adjustment layers and they will all affect this layer here so they're all are going to affect lion number one now also with layers if you've got a few happening there you can rename them so just double click on it and you can rename it to whatever you want and they can just help with your layer so you know what each one is doing okay let's get rid of that layer mask and delete the layer okay what I'll actually do is I'll turn that to black and white because I just want to show you transparency now so we've created a black and white layer here and if we come up here to opacity so this is the only way you can actually see through this layer to the layer underneath other than using a blending mode and we can just drop that opacity if I drop that back to 50% just turn that base layer back on and as we use that slider so here we're showing more of the top layer and as we come down we're showing less of the top layer so it's blending the two it's blending the black and white layer into the bottom layer via opacity of that layer okay I want to show you the difference between opacity and fill you can see up here we've got my pasady slider and we've got to fill slider now if I do it on this image it doesn't seem to make any difference between the two the advice seemed to be the same and they are exactly the same in this case where we just have a basic layer with no effects applied to it so let me go to this image here now this is a template that I've made up for YouTube thumbnails and this is where we can use the fill will make a difference because this layer here is a text layer and then it's had an effect applied to it so the effect is the stroke okay and it shows up in that layer that if it didn't have the stroke then this would not be here so what happens when we use the opacity slide on here it works on the whole image the complete image so it will what the complete liar sorry so the text layer it'll fade that plus it will fade the effect okay that when we use the fill what it does is it only fades the text layer and it lays leaves the effect aligned so if we turn that right off we now have a transparent layer sneaky hey it's a very very cool effect for doing stuff like this okay so that's the difference between opacity and fill opacity will affect the whole layer whatever is on the layer text plus all of the effects and fill will fade the layer but not the effect okay let's talk about blending modes now so but I'm just gonna do this very briefly probably looking at doing a whole video just on blending modes because I fairly fairly involved but I'll just show you the power of blending modes so with this particular thumbnail here what I wanted to do was I want to drop in a picture here of the Nissi v6 holder so I went to my website and I just did a screen shot and then brought that in as a new as a new image so I want to just drop this into here so we'll just drag and drop them onto here okay but the trouble is I don't want all of this white so you could mask this and then cut the holder out and have it on a separate layer but it's quite a bit of work and quite an intricate sort of mask getting it nice and clean that we can actually use a blending mode to get rid of the white so there's a blending mode called darken okay and so how darken works is it'll look at this layer every pixel in this layer and it will look at the pixels that are directly underneath on the layer below and it will only keep the darker pixels so I know that these are all pure white and everything underneath here is going to be darker than pure white so it will get rid of them so if I just click on darken now change that mode to darken and bingo we have got rid of all the white pixels now this is fairly low res but I'll just zoom in a little bit and you can see it does an absolute perfect job way way better than trying to mask it off and create a selection and you can do it in seconds so that's the power of blending modes they do all sorts of different things and they really do open up the whole world of layers it just allows us to do so many different creative things okay let's talk about masks so we'll just go to this image here so I'm going to show you how to apply a mask and how to paint in and out of that mask and sort of why why we use masks so let me just duplicate this layer first and turn it to black and white okay so now we've got a black and white layer sitting on top of the color layer now if I lower mask some of this color in or paint some of this color in and out I can do it via mask so first we just come down here to the bottom of the layers palette and we will click on this icon here make sure you have your layer highlighted the one that you want to add the mask to so we click on there and it throws up a mask is completely filled with white now you need to think of white as being transparent so white reveals black conceals so because this is pure white its revealing everything in this layer okay if I invert this mask and turn it to black so I can do that very quickly just command I on a Mac control I on a PC so that is now filled that mask with black which is completely masking off or blocking off concealing everything within this layer okay now we don't normally want to completely block off a layer so just go back to back to white so what we can do is we can paint in with a black brush so when we paint in black we're gonna be concealing or masking it off and then white will reveal this layer here so we need to go to our brush tool so b4 brush and you can come up here and just select a soft edge brush okay so a soft edge and along the top here we can adjust the opacity and the flow of that brush so let me just go to a hundred percent to start with now this brush will paint the foreground color so if we come down here to our toolbar we've got black and white and at the moment white is the foreground color if you had two different colors just hit D on your keyboard and then that will default to black and white you can toggle them here this little toggle bar here or you can just use X on your keyboard that's the shortcut so okay so we want to paint in black and now as I paint in we are seeing the color underneath okay it says you see that's a little bit strong so what we'd normally do is just set our brush up to paint it in nicely so I like to drop the flow down to sort of halfway and then the opacity will be just to what you really need now you can make your brush bigger or smaller there's two different ways you can use the brackets on your keyboard so they'll make him bigger or smaller or there is a shortcut you hold down the control and option key and if I click and drag left it goes smaller and if I click and drag right it makes the brush bigger you can also change the hardness of the brush so again just click on your control and option key and if we go up and down then it changes the hardness you see the hardness changing there okay so with this brush we want the hardness at zero which means it's a soft edge brush so it may just make that a little bit smaller so we can paint in with lower opacity and we can get that color to exactly where we want okay we can bring some color into the sky now the beauty with it being a mask is that we're not a raising anything we're just painting into a mask and because the mask is either black or white we can paint in with our brush so it's totally non-destructive I'll just bring this up a little bit higher and I'll show you what I mean so I'll paint in the top here and I'll paint a lot of black in now if we want to see our mask on the image just hold down the alt/option key and then click on your mask okay so you can see here I've painted in black now I can reverse that by painting white so if I just changed my foreground color to white now and I paint in here I'm reversing what I've done so said we can paint in and out to a heart's content it's a fantastic way of fine tuning or just working on selective areas within an image you just click on that again with your option key and then that will show you your picture again so we can apply a mask to an adjustment layer as well so this one here is a pixel layer let me just do the same thing but via an adjustment layer so we have a black and white one here if I click on it so you can see this is not pixel based now and we have on the left hand side is the black and white adjustments which comes up in your in your properties panel here if that's not showing again just go to windows and click on properties to bring that up and then it's also throwing in a mask so we can apply that same effect to the mask here so if I paint in black I just turned my brush to black just drop the opacity back okay so I'm doing the same thing as I did before said of it being on a pixel layer and we're now doing it on an adjustment layer the advantage of an adjustment layer over a pixel layer is that your file size is going to be a hell of a lot smaller because it's not pixel based whereas every time I duplicate a layer and basically doubling the file size or multiplying the file size by the size of the actual image so if this was a 50 megabyte file then if I add one more layer then it becomes a hundred paid-for layers that would be 200 megabytes so when you have multiple layers then that can get a little bit taxing on your computer the other thing is that we could have multiple adjustment layers so if I had a curves one on top of here and just jacking that down then I can come back to any layer at any time I can add you know I can paint into the mask or I can go back to the curves adjustment and fine-tune it so that's here the advantage of using adjustment layers and this is probably another subject that I could do a whole video just on adjustment layers so that's it for today folks hope you enjoyed that we showed you layers and layer masking as I said I'm going to timestamp this you can jump to any section at any time if you haven't subscribed and you enjoyed this and you think you can get more benefit from these videos then please do so just hit that subscribe button and if you hit the little bell next to it and I can let you know each time a new video comes out me thanks for watching you guys have an awesome day and I'll catch you next time ciao 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Channel: Dean Cooper Photography

Views: 10,295

Keywords: photoshop, layers and masks in photoshop, layer masking, apply a mask in photoshop, blend modes in photoshop, begineer photoshop tutorials, adjustment layers in photoshop, dean cooper photography

Id: E1mOpjuDcos

Length: 23min 18sec (1398 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 23 2020