ULTIMATE GUIDE to MASKING in Photoshop CC 2019

this is the second episode of a miniseries I dedicate it to masking this time I will be covering everything you need to know about masking in Photoshop I will show you how to utilize pixel and vector layer masks use clipping masks in creative ways and walk you through complex masking workflows for tricky selections I will demonstrate the importance of tools like the pen tool for creating professional parts and less known techniques like using the Dodge and burn tools for refining pixel masks check out the other two videos in this series if you want to learn more about masking the links will be added in the description below once they are published as always if you like the way I explain things and you want to learn more from me make sure to check out our training platform where you can access over 200 hours of premium courses on tools like Photoshop use the link in the description below to start your membership now with a three day free trial alright so first of all before we talk about masking we need to understand how a selection works because believe it or not that's the key of understanding how to do masking so when I create just a normal rectangular marquee selection this already creates a separation between the active and inactive parts so if I used something like the brush tool and start painting you can see already my brush strokes will only be visible within the selection so why is this important because when you are creating masks you are essentially going to hide and show details just like here within the selection we can see what we are doing but outside of the selection we have no effect on what's happening so I'm just going to undo this one snap and we will actually create a useful selection on this image so let's say I want to make a selection of this lady so I'm going to go to the Select menu and choose subject which relies on the Adobe sensei artificial intelligence built into Photoshop which analyzes the image and tries to guess what the subject you can see did a really good job in this case so now we see it our selection as these marching ants which is like the default view for our mosques but if I press Q on the keyboard that is going to switch to the quickmask view and this is almost like a transition between a selection and the mosque you don't necessarily have to do this but this gives you a better idea of what is going to be visible and what is going to be hidden once this selection is turned into a mosque now the default color for the hidden details or masked areas would be red but I actually changed this setting to blue because I found it easier to work with most images this is something you can do by double clicking on this icon here that's the quick mask icon and then you can change the color here you can even change how much overlay you want to have on the mask areas I just kept it at the default 50% and once again you toggle back and forth with the Q keyboard shortcut whenever you want to switch to this view or back to the normal selection view and why is this view useful apart from visualizing our selection well this is where masking technique starts to come into play because for example if I use my brush tool with black and white colors I can hide and show details so with painting with black I can hide details that I don't need and with white I can reveal details so if I just zoom a little bit closer here I think on the shoulder we can include a little bit more that got lost in the subject selection so if I press X on the keyboard I can switch to white color and I can just paint over this detail here make sure we are not chopping off any details from the shoulder so if I want to again remove a bit from it I can just press X and then paint over a little bit more here on these details something like that so refine that edge selection now of course the hair is not perfect for that Photoshop has other features which I'm going to show in a moment but for now all I wanted to show you is that in the quick mask mode can help to refine your selection before you turn it into a mosque so when you want to turn it into a mosque just make sure you press Q again to go back into the normal selection of you first and then click on the Japanese flag icon here on the bottom right that's the add layer mask option which will turn it into a finalized layer mask and this is a pixel mask because we will be creating vector masks later on for now we created a pixel mask so first of all if you want to see your mask how it actually looks you can hold down the alt or option key and click on the mask thumbnail that way you see how Photoshop handles these pixel masks and you can see exactly that white is used to show details and black is used to hide details so why choose black hides the best analogy is light itself so wherever there is light you can see things and whenever does not miss you don't see things so when I chose black Heights that's how I remember it now if I want to see details here on this selection I can zoom closer and the reason why I call this pixel Moscow that's technically how it is called is because it's actually using pixels this is a very high-resolution image so I had to zoom really close to be able to see these pixels and the anti-aliasing on the edges but if you are working with pixels that's just one of the things that you have to remember that if you are resizing these layers up and down the quality of your mask is going to be great just like the image quality itself unless you are using a smart object so there's a lot of technical terms here I'm using if you are not familiar with Photoshop this might be a little bit too much but just bear with me so let's switch back to the normal view by alt or option clicking again on the mask thumbnail and let me just demonstrate this to you so what happens if I use free transform for example and resize the image ctrl T or command T is the shortcut for free transform and if you hold on all option key while resizing it will resize to the center of the image so once I press ENTER it accepts these changes and then if I do the same thing again drag it up you will see when i zoom closer that we lost a lot of the original image quality but also if I check my pixel mask it also lost a lot of the original details so instead of doing this before you are resizing a layer with a pixel mask on it you would like to wrap up both the image and the mosque into a smart object so I would right-click and choose convert to smart object and then that means we will have the original size or resolution of our high-resolution image saved into this layer and also it applies to the mask itself so both the mosque and the image quality will be preserved in the smart object and if I need to go back and refine my mask I can just double click on the smart object layer or the thumbnail and within it I will be able to refine further my mask and just like with the quick mask if I need to go closer and show and hide details so for example up here I want to start refining the edge I can use the brush tool as long as I have the mask selected it's important not the image but the mosque because if you have the image selected and you start painting that's obviously painting on the image itself but if you have the mask selected and you're painting with black just like in the quick mask view it's going to hide details but masking and that's probably the most important thing to remember is a non-destructive method which means even if I make a mistake like so I can switch back to drawing with white and I can reveal these details again so that's probably the most important aspect of working with masks that you are never deleting any details now I mentioned that with hair selection there's a much better way of refining edges and that is actually it's very simple once you have a pixel mosque you just have to double click on the thumbnail so double clicking will take you into the select and more workspace which is a dedicated space for refining your selections and mosques and by the way this is only available in more recent versions of Photoshop so if you have an older version you might not have this feature but instead you will have refined mosque which is quite similar it's just a different way to get to it but here in this view we have a tool which is called refine edge brush tool and with this one I can just paint over the edge and notice how nicely it starts to bring back all those subtle details that we are losing from the hair so if I just paint over here as well I don't go too close inside I just go around the edges and even here we can go over it a bit and there you go it's a much better result but further on we if we feel like there's still more missing details we can paint over them but eventually obviously Photoshop will struggle to find edges if there's only just very small stray hairs floating around because it will start to include details from the background as well so you just have to be careful about how you are using this tool and of course there's lots of other options here so there's plenty of ways of previewing as well at the background you can see it on black and you can even adjust the opacity so we can see it better you can see it on white background and in this case that's probably easier to spot what we are missing so maybe here we can go a little bit further away there's some have details there as well but once I click OK all of these changes will be updated on the mask so once again if I alt click on the mask icon I can see it what we achieved and here's a cool technique that I explained in a couple of other videos and I go into much more detail on these techniques in my Photoshop masterclass and the other courses we have on our course platform if you want to check them out the link is in the description so the technique that I use for refining masks especially on hair or these fine edge details which can also be called technically high-frequency edges so we can use dodging burn but what's important is with the burn tool you want to use the range set to shadows and with the dodge tool you want to set the range to highlights so with the burn tool I can very quickly tidy up details like these that are not important if I'm careful enough I am not losing the hair detail like here as well you can see it pretty much preserved that strand of hair but if I want to bring back a little bit more detail on these strands I can use the torch tool so I'm using again shortcuts to switch back and forth and you can see I can tidy up fairly quickly these hazy details that we don't need and I think that's already looking much better you can get used to seeing details in this mask view or ghost view as well sometimes I call it when I teach in classrooms so when I alt click again back we can see how it looks and we can put a colored background behind it let's say Y and we don't have to work in the mask view when you have something in the background you can also just use these tools like the burn and dodge tool as you can see while having a background visible now of course this takes longer to refine and hair hair is one of the most complicated things to select especially when your original background is complicated and has lots of different colors in it so I don't want to go into too much depth from this because I want to cover all the different masking techniques instead so this was just an introduction to how to work with pixel masks and what a pixel mask means so remember we actually have this all within a smart object so I can go back to that by turning off this document that was open and we can already see how much better the left side is compared to the right side of the hair selection but even just selecting a person I wouldn't just rely on a pixel mask I would actually use the pixel mask only for the hair but for the body I would use a vector mask I'm going to get to that but before we go there I would like to show you another example of working with pixel masks and in this case I come find two images so we have the original image of this girl and then I placed the Tigers next to her now I can't remember exactly whether she was just standing there or whether she was leaning to something but I think I just figured out that it would look nicely these two images together and this is actually from our 365 days of creativity series if you want to check it out again the link is in the description below it's a completely free series to watch here on our channel it's one minute video we covered each day or for a whole year in 2018 and if you want to see the more in-depth tutorials for each of those we have a 30 hours long actually more than 30 hours long course on our platform which again if you subscribe you can get access to everything for a small monthly fee alright so here we have the mosque on this image with the Tigers again it's a pixel mask and I started off with the subject selection and then we find it slightly but just like before if I alt click on this we can actually see the mask itself you can see what's visible what's hidden away and the reason I'm showing you this is because this is always a good thing to do before you finalize an image sometimes you don't even know these details like this one here I wouldn't have noticed unless I check my mask and once I check my mask I can use things like the brush tool to refine edges again here there was something left behind from the original details and even like here on the fur this should be transparent because anything that is not white will be see-through so if I alt click back and forth you can see that that's actually so should be solid fur so I can use the white brush tool and paint over that detail same goes for this part here as well once again if I switch back and forth it's hardly noticeable only visible once we are actually in the mask view and the same goes for the ear once again once I paint over it it comes back and we can see now it is completely solid so this shouldn't be see-through or trans parent and then the technique that we used in the previous example with the burn tool I can use that here as well to tidy up the edge and look how nicely it works here and that was the burn tool and then the Doge tool I can use just to brighten up the edges a bit switching back to the burn tool again and then switching to the brush tool to tidy up the edge something like that all right so that is obviously a much neater edge already and the same thing we would be able to do all around here especially better on the right side but I don't want to waste more time on this I just wanted to show you that when you work with pixel masks always remember to check your mask view and we find the edge there using the brush tool touch burn and so on and so forth and of course the select and mask feature as well which is very robust and maybe you can do a lot of more advanced techniques with that but let's move on to another big category of masking techniques in Photoshop which is called clipping masks and first of all I am going to show you a tool that is one of the most recent tools introduced in CC 2019 it's called the frame tool now I am NOT a huge fan of this tool but in a way I'm starting to get used to it and they are improving it and I know that it's going to become more powerful as we go along but that's the frame tool and I picked an image already where it will work quite nicely so with this tool what I can do is to draw a frame and so I just highlight this area within the frame and similarly to InDesign this created this placeholder for us and if I use this image from the previous example which I have prepared here on a separate layer I can just use the move tool and drag and drop it onto the placeholder and it will automatically turn this into a special type of clipping mask so it's going to mask out the details outside of that rectangle but similarly to before it's completely non-destructive so I can move the image around I can even resize it if I wanted to and align it into that so that looks a little bit better maybe a bit further down something like that and if you haven't tried the frame tool yet I highly recommend to check it out but before we move on to our next example I wanted to show you a quick technique here that can improve this type of compositions so to make this more realistic what I would do is to use these lovely drop shadows that we have here in the original photograph and select them using the selection tool I'm just going to select them like that by the way whenever you are working with selections just hold down the spacebar while you are making your selections to be able to move it around and refine the position of them once you have your selection ready select the background image and press command or control J that will put that onto a separate layer so that is selected or isolated now I still have it in the original layer but on this new layer I'm going to use hue saturation or actually there is an even faster way if we go to the adjustments from the image menu there is this option called desaturate which completely gets rid of the saturation so it turns into grayscale and then what I can do is to put this on top of my image so once I have my image layer turned back on I can put the d saturated background color on top of it and I'm just going to switch to multiply blend mode now this is a bit at the moment too dark but I'm going to also use another adjustment from here in the adjustments I just choose levels and then drag the highlight clipping closer to the histogram there now if I click OK you can see when I turn this on and off it just creates that nice shadow on the edges that we wanted to see so that's all I wanted to show you as an extra little technique here with this image but let's move on and talk about clipping masks because the frame tool in a way is almost like a cheat it's not really a clipping mask but it works similarly to that or even to a vector mask to an extent but what is it clipping masks now a clipping mask can be used in a lot of different ways but the probably the easiest example is when you have a text layer and in this case is just a single character this big N character I'm using the phone heavy toss which is a brilliant font if you want to find it it's free font so when I have a character and it's an editable text layer so if I use the type tool I can select this I can make changes to it but if I put an image layer on top of this so now it completely covers it and we can see that it doesn't follow the shape of that character but all I have to do to combine these two is to alt or option click between the two layers so that lying between two layers just click on that and once I do that that turns it into a clipping mask another way of doing this is to select the layer on top and use command option G or ctrl what G that also will create the clipping between the two of them so the top layer is clipped onto the layer underneath it so if you seen our illustrator masking video there I explained that you can tell what is your clipping mask in Illustrator by looking at your layers panel and you will notice a little on the line below the name of that player the same applies here in Photoshop as well so we get that little underline there and the layer clipped onto this Moss which is the text in this case is our mask will be indicated with a little arrow pointing downwards so if I alt click again between the two layers that disappears and then it comes back so these two little things are what you need to look out for to be able to identify where you're clipping masks are so this is obviously a very useful technique and similarly to the frame tool we can use the selected image layer and the move tool to move it around as you can see I can position it within the text or I can select the text layer itself and move that around but the coolest thing with this technique is that I can use the type tool and change this text to whatever I need so it's still an editable text while having the clipping applied on it now if you start combining clipping masks with pixel masks you can do these cool effects where you have out-of-bounds details coming out and the way I've done this if I just turn off these other two layers is by simply using this same image as a duplicate layer and use a pixel mask on it to highlight these few leaves that I wanted to come out from the background so if I hope use alt or option P to click on the layer mask you can see exactly what I've done there and with a bit of drop shadow on them it even has a bit of depth once again this is an example from our 365 days of creativity course and series so if you want to see other creative projects like this highly recommend to check it out so let's move on to another example this is actually very similar to the previous one so I won't even spend too much time on it once again we have a word in this case same font as before and nice image on top let's turn this into a clipping mask alt click between the two layers and then again have a bit of out-of-bounds effects here which again relies on a pixel mask so simple but very effective technique again same example as before a combination of a clipping and the pixel mask but let's see yet another example which is slightly different so here we have an image that was the original black-and-white photograph that I use and I just created a separate layer to add the bit of color on the lips and then I used a pixel mask to separate the lady with the hat from the background but then what I wanted to do is to have this nice circle which is like a container so I just place that circle behind her or underneath her in the layer structure and then I can use alt or option key to create the clipping and then have a separate layer which will only show the Hat again creating the out of bound effects so you can see if I turn off the other layers I intentionally most out these parts here I could leave mosk out by using black all of those details so the two together works nicely and creates this final result so without the layer on top again it would completely close it into the circle but with that layer which is not clipped onto the circle I can create the out-of-bounds effect again same exact example as the two previous ones that I showed you and you can see already that with a combination of masking techniques you can be very creative and you can come up with so many really cool effects very quickly now of course you can get even more advanced once you start using adjustment layers with clipping masks and also combining vector shapes into a clipping mask so you can see here in this case we have quite a lot of layers I'm just going to reduce the thumbnail size that way we can see all of our layers together a good example would be this layer here so if I turn it off we can see those two triangles are combined into one layer and if I turn off the image we can just see the triangles themselves but also notice that I have a gradient map adjustment layer on top which is also clipped onto those triangles which I can also turn off so by default these are just two black triangles on the same layer it's a vector shape layer if I select one of these triangles and use the black arrow on your path selection tool I can alt click and drag or option click and drag and add as many shapes within the same layer as I want if you create a separate shape by the way let's just draw maybe a circle separately you can see it ends up being on a separate layer we can combine these two layers by selecting them and using command or control e and that's going to merge them into one layer but still allow us to select them individually now I'm just going to go back here so I wanted to show you that having these two shapes on the same layer and then adding a layer on top as a clipping layer will create this effect as we've seen it before and the cool thing about this if I start moving this around it moves obviously in both of those shapes but once I add an adjustment layer in this case this gradient map on top also clipped onto this group it will be able to restrict the adjustment to our selected triangles so it will only apply the gradient map onto that selected area so just like clipping an image onto a text layer or shapes you can also clip adjustment layers to any type of layers once again alt click to remove the clipping or click again to add it back and now that I showed you this you probably can tell how I created this composition again if you want to see the whole workflow this is also from our 365 days of creativity series and that's what I wanted to show you about clipping masks so now it's time to talk about vector masks now we can't talk about where the masks without the pen tool and this is one of the most crucial skills that you need to learn if you want to be good at graphic design because pen tool can be used for so many different things including illustration but also selections I am going to show you quickly here on this example using the pen tool a full vector mask creation so pen tool selected set to path mode is how you want to start and then just zoom close because you want to see details and I'm going to use the sorting point maybe somewhere around here and then click all the way to the top where it's still straight and then zoom closer and start drawing these curves now when you click and drag you can create curves and while drawing your curves you can hold down the spacebar to move the currently selected Anchor Point around while you are still drawing it so I can line it and then continue further the curve and I can go up there I can draw a straight line I can using the pen tool can be a tricky one so I'm not going to cover how to work with the pen tool I have a completely separate course for that if you are interested and I'm probably going to do more videos on this in the future but for now we are just concentrating on so if you're not familiar with this tool you can check those out so I'm just going to draw this very quickly and you will see a cool technique here that I'm going to show you so when you are doing this you will eventually get to a point where you need to turn around your canvas I'm just going to make sure it's nice and round there okay so here I find it easier if I use the our keyboard shortcut so our for rotate hold it down click and drag and then continue drawing so I find it easier to draw these shapes vector shapes when we have the angle set up to be going slightly up and to the right because I'm right-handed that's just the direction in which way I can draw these lines better and I found it much faster if I do it this way it's actually quite hard to see the edges sometimes so I'm just being a little bit sloppy here just so you can see quickly the end result so that's quite a lot of details but I'm going to try to get through it and maybe we can even speed up this part [Music] let me just stop it here for a second because I just realized that there will be all of these little intricate details here on the lens at the bottom and if I want to do this properly I would need to go around them one by one now instead of using the pen tool in these cases I would recommend to use the curvature tool so instead of drawing each individual points one by one so I could draw one bump and then the next and I would keep drawing these slowly by one by one and it's just really hard instead what I would do in these cases is to use the curvature tool with which all I have to do is to click on the corner points so top and bottom top and bottom and look at that how nicely it's doing it for me so this is definitely a huge time-saver so again just top and the bottom points so each of these little heels the top of the hill and then between the two hills that's all you need to do so this can be a huge time-saver but not only that it can also reduce the anchor points that you are working with and that's obviously in these cases are the most important thing as well you don't want this vector most to end up having so many different anchor points so this is still time-consuming and you might be wondering why am I doing this why am I not using a quick selection or magic wand or something like that and those are the lazy selection tools they can obviously be useful and I could explain to you how to work with them but I honestly don't recommend to work with them especially if you're working on professional projects maybe you can start with one of those tools your selections but if you are selecting especially hard edged details like objects in most cases like this one as well you will be able to create a much better final result by using the vector mask tools like the pen tool or curvature tool all right we are almost at the end so by using vector masks on hard edged selections like this you will be able to refine the edges much faster and easier compared to a pixel mask plus quick mask and all the rest of the quick selection techniques including magic wand as well is not going to produce a nice edge detail especially when you have background colors that are very similar to the actual objects color so I'm just going to show that quickly to you once we get to the end of this again I'm just going to speed it up here because you've seen the important detail and part of this technique [Music] okay so here we have our final vector mass selection and you can see how complex that bottom part was I didn't even realize until I started doing it so but this is still a really good example to see the difference so once we have our path we can turn this into a vector mask by selecting the layer and then holding down the command ctrl key by clicking on the Japanese flag icon so that's going to create a vector mask instead of a pixel mask so let's do that and the way you can tell that you have a vector mask is that the thumbnail will have a gray background and whatever is visible is going to be white when you select your mask and you use the direct selection tool or the path selection tools you can actually highlight the shape or the path that you created so that's included within your vector mask now this creates obviously a very nice crisp edge and it's resolution-independent by the way so it's not going to lose quality because it's vector based but if I create a new layer underneath this I'm just going to add the solid color layer let's just drop that down there maybe change this color to something that will make sure that we can see all the details so it stands out a bit more okay that's a very bad color combination something like this is a bit better so now if i zoom closer we'll be able to tell how nice the edge detail is so obviously I could we find this further but just by looking through the edges I can see that we've done a fairly good job even here at the bottom at first attempt but wherever I spot any issues so let's just be a little bit more critical and zoom closer here if we find any parts that we would like to refine we will be able to go over these edges I'm actually quite happy with most of this maybe here I can see a bit of a mistake so I can go back to my mask use the direct selection tool and select details like make a marquee selection with the direct selection tool and then if i zoom closer you can see this probably better I can move them around so I can push them in a bit if I felt like there was some detail that wasn't necessary or even here if I want I can get rid of these this little bump just adjust the curve and then select that point and push it in slightly until we get a better edge detail so that although it's not 100% accurate but I think it looks already better here I can see a bit of the edge detail showing so again I use direct selection tool and just push these up by using the arrow keys you can notch details by one pixel at a time so up and down arrows I can adjust that that looks better maybe select these push them to the left a bit they slicking better - and then here maybe we can select more of these points and just move them up a bit again I'm trying to get rid of all of those white details from the original image again here maybe we can just select that point direct selection tool and just push it in already it looks much better and then this is just a highlight here but if I want I can push it in as well slightly that point up there can be pushed in as well maybe a little bit more and then we have a much better detail so now let's compare this to a pixel mask so the sloppy and fast way of doing the selection would be to get rid of our vector mask and I'm going to turn off this other layer as well so having this layer selected I can go first let's just try the subject selection that's probably the laziest option there is and it is actually going to do quite a good job but of course it will be struggling and making selections on these fine details especially when there's not enough contrast on the edges but it even struggles here on the left side so if I press Q on the keyboard shortcut that's horrible that edge detail again here on the top really bad and I wouldn't even bother using the tools like the quick mask and refine the edges because it's never going to be as nice crisp and as a vector mosque so that's why learning the pen tool is crucial it's very important and I'm not even going to waste time on showing you the differences between the magic wand the quick selection tool and the color range because they are all going to have issues or they will be struggling with the same not so nice edge details especially again when your object and the background colors are very similar because all of these automated tools rely on color differences or contrast and if there's not enough of that it's not going to be able to create good selections well with the pen tool and the vector mask you can always create an amazing selection so just so we can see how this selection would end up if I create my mask you can see the end result of subject select feature and then we can see the end result of our vector mask quite a big improvement I would say now let me show you one more example quickly of vector masks because there's another aspect of them that I love that you can actually combine multiple parts onto the same vector mask why would you need that well for example here we have a periscope and then we have a different background so I must add this object from the original white background or blue background sorry the sea and the sky and now I can put whatever I want in the background so it's completely see-through but again I used a vector mask because I wanted to have these nice crisp sharp edges but I also wanted to have the flexibility to make changes to these edges easily so for example here if i zoom closer you can see that this point supposed to be a bit more rounded which is luckily something that we can easily do by using the pen tool I can zoom closer and add the point here and another point up there then remove that other point and using the Alt key I can adjust the edges or the handle points and there we have a nice rounded corner so this is again just a reminder that you have full editable details that you can easily construct and refine as you go along but what's more interesting here is that I use a lot of shapes for the vector mask so working with the vector shapes that you have in Photoshop some of them are actually hiding details while others are showing details so if I select this big circle here the outside circle and I can check here on the top it says combine shapes while this one in the middle says subtract front shape so these are called shape operations and it's similar to Pathfinder in Illustrator so some parts of the vector mask will show while some parts will hide details you can also think of them as one of them would be white in a pixel mask and another shape would be black in a pixel mask but to better understand this let me show you this from scratch I'm not going to do the whole thing again this is in our Photoshop masterclass if you want to learn better this method but I'm going to just quickly show you the most important aspect of it so if I use a vector mask first of all command click on the mask icon just create an empty vector mask and then I can use the shape tool in this case the ellipse tool set to path mode I can also check that this is set to combine shapes and then I can click and drag start drawing my circle or ellipse hold down the spacebar to adjust it to the position where it needs to go as the trickiest thing to draw circles without the spacebar I would never be able to find where they need to go but with this I can very quickly align it and there I think it's quite good so I can let go so now that it's been created I just have to make sure it's pasted into the vector mask you can always control C control V or command C and command V to paste it into it now that is in the vector mask I can draw my next circle so I'm going to draw this and again align it to the center part like so alright but because it was also set to combine shapes it's still showing details I actually would like this to be used for subtracting details so if I switch to that now we can see it removes those details in the middle now to be able to reveal the details in the middle I would need to draw separate shapes for that so in the meantime I'm just going to keep this shape also set to combine shapes so just I can see what I'm doing and I'm going to continue using shapes add one on this one here in the middle and line it again something like that I'm not going to waste too much time on this because I guess I you will get the idea now I'm going to use the rectangle tool for these okay so now we have a combination of these shapes I can go back select that path and switch it to subtract front shape and that way we now have the perfect combination where we have details shown with some of these shapes and we have also parts that are hidden away so within the same vector mask using multiple shapes some of them to show some of them to hide details you can get really complex and refined selections and this is really where you are starting to do a very professional masking workflow but not only everything is editable but you are also saving time by using geometric shapes wherever it's possible and last but not least there's another masking feature that we need to talk about in Photoshop and that is the smart filter mask whenever you create a smart object and you apply a filter on it you will also get a mosque for specifically for that filter and that's what we call smart filter mask so in this case the original image looked like this so there was no motion blur or anything like that but then I went along and created a vector mask for the car which we have inside the smart object so we can see the vector mask there I've done all the work and created this nice outline and then having it placed on top of the original background I used on the background a motion blur but it was created on a smart object which means that it's non-destructive and more importantly the motion blur I only used in the background and in the foreground but whatever is in focus that central part is actually masked out so the motion blur itself is masked out if I shift click on this I can hide it so you can see how it would look like if I didn't do that well if I shift click again I can show again those parts so basically what you can do with this type of masks is to mask out effects so same thing if I use the brush tool and start painting black will hide the effect or filter and white will show the filter again as simple as that so same exact principle what you would use on a pixel mask but in this case it is used to sure hide the filter Photoshop is actually doing a really good job at showing you these three main categories of layer masks in the properties panel so the filter mask the pixel mask and the vector mask so you have the three main categories here and you can actually switch between them and this is actually the three type of masks you can have on a layer and the fourth one would be a clipping mask but the actual layer mask we call are these that you can see here together so would you ever need all of these different masks on the same layer well it can easily happen and I had previously projects where I had to combine them and I even had to use multiple layer masks or vector masks on the same layer and it's good to know that if you are creating a group so layer group command G or ctrl G on a layer the group itself can have more masks on it so I can add another mosque and in that way if a layer is within a group you are actually adding more mosques on the same layer so it's almost like unlimited options that you have there actually I think you can create up to ten sub groups which means you still have a limitations but let's not go down that route instead let me show you one final example where I have a good combination of a pixel mask and a vector mask but for this technique I like to use two separate layers so the same layer duplicated one having a pixel mask the other one having a vector mask and this is actually the most common workflow I would use for selecting people professionally because the body is best to be selected with a vector mask because we have nice sharp edges so clothes normally jewelry even and just the skin itself normally it's best to be selected with the vector mask but the hair is much better selected with the pixel mask because obviously we have all those fine details that you won't be able to select properly with the vector mask so as you can see I combined these two layers we can see them one without the other one but by combining them together we get a really good like best of both worlds selection pixel mask for soft edge selections which is hair fur cross all that type of things and then a vector mask for the hard edge selections again this is one of many examples that I cover in my Photoshop masterclass so if you want to learn more about selections and masking and become really good at doing these things fast and efficiently and the professional way I highly recommend to check it out again we have a monthly subscription so if you become a member you can access all of our courses for a small monthly fee and I hope you found this extensive tutorial on Photoshop masking techniques useful if you want to learn all the different masking techniques in Illustrator and InDesign go and check out the links in the description below and watch those videos for free here on YouTube let us know in the comments section what would you like us to cover next time on this series click on the link in the description or the join button to become a member if you want to work on future projects with us and see the whole design or illustration process live thanks a lot for watching like and share this video if you enjoyed it have fun learning guys and I will see you in the next one [Music]

Channel: Yes I'm a Designer

Views: 100,265

Rating: 4.9650908 out of 5

Keywords: ULTIMATE GUIDE to MASKING in Photoshop CC 2019, masking in photoshop, photoshop cc 2019, photoshop, photoshop cc, photoshop tutorial, selection in photoshop, quick mask photoshop, pixel mask photoshop, frame tool in photoshop cc 2019, clipping mask in photoshop cc 2019, vector mask in photoshop cc, smart filter mask photoshop, adobe photoshop

Id: NgcFg9I6grc

Length: 48min 43sec (2923 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 22 2019