(magical jingle)
Well hey everybody, I'm Nathaniel Dodson from tutvid.com welcome into this
photoshop tutorial where today we're going to take a look at how to mask
stuff in photoshop and why masking is so important. Let's get right to the point
and if you enjoy this tutorial, please make sure you subscribe to my youtube
channel. Let's get into photoshop.
Alright, so here we are in adobe photoshop and the first thing
I want to take a look at is what is a layer mask? Let's go ahead and create a
solid color layer. This is just a layer that carries a solid color with it.
Maybe we'll make it bright red, why not. This little thing attached to it here in
the layers pannel, that's a layer mask. Notice right now it's white. Because when
a layer mask is white whatever is on that layer, it shows, but when that layer mask
is black, if we invert the color of this layer mask by hitting CMD/CTRL + I
The opposite of white is black. When a layer mask is black the stuff that is on
that layer cannot be seen. So what does that mean? Well, let's set this back to
white by hitting CMD/CTRL + I one more time, and I've got this brush tool and I'm
going to paint with the color black. See my forground color set to black. I'm painting
with black so it's going to hide red when I do this and reveal the image
underneath. You can see I can paint out just an area that reveals them. Let me
bring her arm into play here as well. Now the cool thing about this is we're not
erasing the red. So if the client comes back and says, "look, I hate the wierd
gummy bare looking shape that they have in the middle of this, can you hide
a little bit up here?" I can say "yeah, sure." I'll just set my foreground color to
white, and I'll paint some of that red right back in and I can do that just like
so. That's very basic not supper practical explanation of what the layer mask is.
I'm going to come over here and I'm going to set the layer mask to solid black i'm
going to set my foreground color to black and I'm going to use the hotkey
OPT + DELETE, that would be ALT + BACKSPACE on the PC. We've filled our layer mask with black.
Notice also, I have this little white selection around my mask. That means I'm working in or on
that mask directly. Now one of the cool things you can do with a mask is you can
use a brush or a selection of any sort but you can use a soft edge brush and that's
going to give you a feathered look. So if I paint with white here I'm going to use
the bracket keys to make my brush giant. And let's say we want it to have like a red
fade coming in up here. Well I could paint this. You can see how I'm just getting
this sort of really strong faded edge, but I can also select the layer mask and I can
do something like go filter, blur, and apply a gaussian blur and say look, I
want you to blur the living daylights out of this like to the degree of 400 pixels.
And notice what it's doing. I can see here on my layer mask and also I can see the
change up here. I'm just getting this red fade and I can set my solid color layer
notice now I have the white tick mark selecting the solid color layer. I can set
this layer to a blend mode of like, I don't know, screen. We get this kind of red-ish
tinge up there in the corner. I could also do something like soft light, right.
There we go. We've got a different looking effect, not quite as good in my opinion.
But that's something you can do. I'm going to delete that layer. Were going to come over here
we're going to grab this dog
I'm just going to load him as a selection real quick, and I'm going to grab my move
tool and we'll drag him and drop him over here on the bridegroom image. He's far too
big but he's a sort of appearing here on the foreground, ruh-roh. And we're going to hit
CMD/CTRL + T and I'm going to just scale him down, whoops, wrong hot-key. I should
be holding shift and option. I want him to kind of look like he's peeking out from behid
her, right? Kind of like, hay, what's going on out there everybody? Something like that.
But of course, it doesn't look very realistic because he looks like he's in front of her
and the perspective is all messed up. so what we would do is we would add
a layer mask. So we could add a layer mask using the add layer mask icon, or you can go
layer, layer mask, reveal all. That just gives you a white layer mask. Honestly, it's simpler
to just use the add new layer mask button in the layers panel. And then in here we can
zoom in on the dog and just begin erasing the arias we don't want. So how do we erase it?
Well, we use the brush tool and we set our foreground color not to white but to black
because remember, black hides. So I'm going to make my brush a little bit smaller
using my square bracket keys and I'm just going to begin painting the dog away.
So I'll paint him away until we're kind of up to the edge of the dress. Now obviously it
still looks bad because part of the dog is just missing. Here's where the beauty of layer
masks is. We can simply flip our foreground and background colors so we're painting with
white, get back to the brush tool. Maybe make the brush tool a little smaller. And we can come
in here and kind of do our precision painting and just make sure that the dog is painted in
exactly along the edge of her dress. We could use a soft edge brush. We could use a hard
edge brush and now he's over-lapping right here a little bit. So we can flip our foreground
and background color again hitting the letter X. Black is now the foreground color. I can just paint
the dog back a little bit, switch back to white, and just touch that edge up until it's just perfect. So
now he's sort of peaking his giant head and body out from behind her; I'm aware the perspective and
sizing isn't quite perfect, but it's... This is just an example. Now another thing we could do is something like maybe
we want to change the color of the smoke bombs. We can do something like add a hue saturation adjustment
layer. Notice these adjustment layers, they get a layer mask attached automatically. We can just go ahead
and swing the hues. So maybe we'll make the smoke bomb like pink or something. So there
we go, just swing the hue + 68. Obviously the problem is now their skin is green and his
suit is that sort of purple-ish whatever color that is and the dog is also green.
There's a lot of mess here. So the first thing we do is select the layer mask and just hit
CMD/CTRL + I to hide the entire effect. And let's just selectively apply it. Now here's where
you could use the brush tool but we're going to use a different technique. We're going
to try using our quick selection tool and grab a bunch of this smoke. You can see we've
grabbed this whole aria out here. I'me going to hold down my ALT/OPT key and try to just
get rid of some of that stuff. This is not at all going to be a perfect selection. I'm
just showing you a different way to go ahead and constrain a mask and you
know, we'll just do it to this part of the smoke here. Because that's going to be
nice and easy for this video. You could take this into select and mask though
and really refine it if you want. And then you would select the mask and you could
fill this with white, our foreground color is white. OPT + Delete, that would be
ALT + Backspace on the PC, and then select deselect and you can see we now
have that part of our smoke that's purple. If I shut off that saturation layer off, It's blue again.
Now it's purple. So it's kind of... it's a really great way to constrain anything you want to constrain.
Now just a couple quick tricks here with the layer mask. You can ALT/OPT click a layer mask
and you can view it's alpha channel so you can see here we've got these white random streaks.
If you wanted to clean that stuff up you could always take the brush tool. We can paint with black, maybe
make my brush a little bigger. And we can just paint over that because it's like, yeah, I know purple
should be out there so we'll just make sure nothing is showing out there. ALT/OPT click the layer mask
again over here to get back to the image. You can shift-click a layer mask and that temporarily disables
it. See now we're back to the whole messed up green purple looking image. Shift click it again
to make it enabled once more. You can always drag a layer mask down to the garbage to just straight up
get rid of it if you want. I'm going to cancel it because I don't want to get rid of it. And lastly
you just want to make sure that you're ether selecting the layer mask if you want to work
on it or selecting layer if you want to work on that. So here if I want to paint on the
dog layer and paint white up here, I can paint two blobs of white, but it's there on
the dog pixel layer, not in my layer mask. If I wanted to work on the layer mask,
obviously, I would click on the layer mask. So I'm going to undo that to get rid of the
big blobs of white because while they're nice looking, they're not that nice looking.
Alright, the last example I want to give you here for a mask is we want to clean up his suit a little bit.
Maybe he's looking at it and he's like you know what, I should have gone with the black suit
for my wedding, not the navy blue. Can you make my suit black? Well, yes absolutely we can. We can
add a black and white adjustment layer here and we will maybe darken up the blues a
little bit since we know his suit has some blue in it. Now obviously the whole image is black
and white, not what we want. I'm going to hide the dog because that's just very distracting.
Select the layer mask. CMD/CTRL + I to hide that and we need to create a selection over his suit.
So once more I'll probably just go with the quick selection tool here and just create a ruff selection
over it. And that's fine. We get our ruff selection and we can clean this up now with the brush.
So now we select that layer, we just want to flip this right from white to black so we can actually
CMD/CTRL + I. That will take those arias of the mask in our selection and just make them solid
white, CMD/CTRL + D to deselect. Now we would zoom in you can see we have black and whited up
some of this stuff and this is the beauty of the mask comes into play. You can take your brush
tool. Make my brush a little bit smaller here. We want to paint with our foreground color set to
black because we want to get rid of the black and white effect on some of these arias, like
here under his arm or right here on her arm we want to get rid of that. We want to get rid
of the black and white effect up in here right, so just go ahead and paint with
black in there, great. I'me going to move up here. This whole lapel did not get picked up by our selection
so hit the letter x. White is now our foreground color. I can just paint over that with my brush set to white
and we're going ahead and making that part of his jacket, well, we're making it not blue anymore I'll
put it to you that way. And over here a little bit of black and white in this got spilled onto the background
so we're going to paint with black. Just make sure our background wall has that yellow color. His wrist also
should not be gray so we will make sure that's corrected as well. Right up here along his neck line
that should all work and then i will come in here along her a little bit and just clean up her chest
aria. And then we move back and you can see that we have created this black and white effect
just sucking the blue right out of the suit and we constrained it to just that area using this
little mask. So masks, they are super duper powerful. You're going to use them all the
time in photoshop. I want to do a quick comprehensive breakdown in 10 minutes
or less on how to use layer masks in photoshop. I highly recommend you check
them out, create precise selections and begin masking instead of trying to use the eraser
tool. Even when you could use the erase tool, by using a mask you can always go and just
paint black or white and further hide or further uncover whatever artwork or anything that
you're working with. And if you are using adjustment layers like this you need to use masks because you
can't erase adjustment layers. And the same goes by the way for smart objects.
So, that will wrap it up for this one.
So there you have it, for a super speedy introductory guide on what masking is and why I think you'll love it
if you get into it. If you did enjoy this tutorial, consider picking up a copy of my photoshop course. It's all about
how to retouch images in photoshop. We cover all kinds of masking in there as well, and you will
really really up your photoshop game using that course and you'll also help support what we do
here at tutvid.com as well and for that, hmm I am super thankful to you. If you are on discord
consider joining our discord. Discord.me/tutvid. We got a nice little bumping community that
we're building over there. It's a whole bunch of fun. And, yeah so for creating masks and selections and
just constraining stuff with masks in a very non- destructive way in Adobe Photoshop, that's it.
Get it? Got it? Good. Nathaniel Dodson, tutvid.com I'll catch you in the next one