Lesson 1: Introduction to Photoshop Layer Masks Pt-2
For a long time I didn’t use layer mask or even know what they were but now can’t imagine not using them. They are one of the most powerful tools in photo shop and indispensable for post processing. So let’s go ahead and get started. Ok the first lesson is going to be fairly simple but I think it will give you a good introduction to the basic of layer masking and what I got is three images. Each one is a shot of a picnic table with a cat on it. Now in each image nothing changes except for the position of the cat and there’s the third one there and you can see in each one the cat is in a different spot so what I want to do is combine these three images through the use of layer masking so that it gives the appearance of three cats sitting on this table.
So we are going to start with image one here and use that as my base or background image so I’m going to minimize it and open up image two and I’m going to go ahead and select the entire image and then to edit copy and then minimize it and open up image one again and edit paste and what’s that doing is just pasting the copy image as a new layer in image one .Ok. Open up image three, select all, edit , copy ok we are going to edit paste ,once again ok and hit the tab key in and bring the tool bar back, and now we have are three layers, each one with the picnic table with the cat in the different position. Ok I’m going to go ahead and hide layer two for right now and I’m going to start working on layer one. What I’m going to do is create a layer mask on layer one and the way to do that you have to simply click on the layer mask icon which is on the right angled with a circle in the middle down here and at the bottom of the layers pallet. So I click on it and I’ve got a layer mask thumbnail on layer one and you can also see that I got a white border around the thumbnail and that just tells me the mask is active. If I just click on to the layer thumbnail, now I’ve got the white border around it and that tells me the layer is active. You’ll notice too that the foreground background color is red and blue here if I click on to the layer mask and switch to black and white that’s because when we are working with layer mask we are working in grey scale. The way the layer mask works is that any part of the mask that is white will reveal the layer and any part of the mask that is black will hide the layer. Now by default when you click on the layer mask icon it creates a mask that is filled with white and so the entire layer is revealed and that’s why it doesn’t look like anything really happened.
In case you didn’t see the video in part 1 of this series… here it is again
This is part of a series of posts, you can read the rest of it by clicking on the links for the Table of Contents at the top of this post.
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