After you create a mask, you might see a white outline.
One easy way to remove it is to go into Filter, Other, and choose Minimum.
Select Roundness on the drop down and drag
the radius slider to the right to remove the white outline around your mask.
My name is Jesus Ramírez.
I've done a lot of masking in my 18 year professional career,
especially now with my work creating posters for the Hollywood industry.
In this video, I will reveal to you five
professional masking tricks you probably don't know.
The last one is an advanced group masking
technique I'm sure you haven't seen anywhere else.
So make sure you stick around to the very end and let me know if it was new to you.
First, let's talk about vector masks, which create razor sharp edges.
They're perfect for objects with smooth
edges, but they can be difficult and time consuming to create.
Here's the trick to speed up the process.
Activate the Object Selection tool.
From the options bar, enable the Object Finder.
The subjects in the image will now highlight as you hover over them.
Click on one to make a selection.
Then go into the Paths panel and click on this icon we're holding Alt.
In this box, you can input a number from 0.5 to 10.
Lower values give you more anchor points.
This is the result with 0.5. In higher values, result in fewer anchor points.
This is a result with 10.
When you create a Vector mask, you want to use the fewest anchor points
as possible while maintaining the shape of the object.
In this example, a value of 4 will work great.
Then from the Layers panel, hold CTRL
and click on the layer mask icon to create a Vector mask.
Now you can use the curvature pen tool and all other vector tools to edit the path.
When you're done, you'll have an object with smooth razor sharp edges.
By the way, if you're learning something
new, make sure you hit the like button and subscribe.
When you apply a mask to anything that has
hair or fur, the edges won't always look great.
In this image, the fur is up against a difficult background
and it is out of focus, making it very difficult to select.
One of the best kept secrets in the Hollywood industry to masking hair
or fur is that we don't mask it, we paint it.
Either on the mask, on a new layer with pixels, or both.
You will need a fur brush for this.
Let's create a new layer one from scratch to take on this project.
On a white background,
make black your foreground color and enable the curvature pen tool.
From the options bar, set the mode to shape.
Then click to add a vector point on top
and add another point on the bottom of the canvas.
Now go back and click on the first point.
Notice the circle icon on the cursor.
This indicates that it will close your path.
Next, click in the center of the line
to add an anchor point and drag out. And do the same on the other side.
When you have something that looks like
a strand of hair, you can convert it into a brush.
Go into Edit and choose define brush preset.
Give the brush a name and press OK.
This doesn't look much like fur yet.
You will need to change the brush settings by clicking on this icon.
Use my settings as a starting point,
but you probably will need to adjust them to fit your needs.
First, increase the spacing.
Notice the preview of the brush here.
Keep an eye on it as you change the brush settings.
Then enable the shape dynamics.
Increase the size jitter to make each strand slightly different lengths and add
a tiny bit of angle jitter to slightly rotate each strand.
Set the control to the right section
so the fur follows the direction you paint along.
Next, enable the scattering
and increase both the scatter and count to add more strands.
When you're happy with your brush, you can save it.
Click on the fly out menu and choose
New brush preset and give it any name you want.
Now go back into your working document and let's get the mask ready.
First, we'll need room to work with.
We need to contract the mask.
Go into Filter, Other and choose and choose Minimum.
Contract the mask so that you have enough room to paint the fur back in.
Eight pixels works great in this case.
Make sure that white is your foreground color.
Zoom in to see the edge and paint.
Remember, you can use the left and right brackets to adjust your brush size and use
the left and right arrow keys to rotate the brush.
Keep painting along the edge until you're happy with the results.
This looks much better than any selection you can make.
But remember, the fur is out of focus. Look at it here.
You need to match the blur on your mask as well.
To do so, go into Filter, Blur and choose Gaussian Blur.
Match the blur of the image as best as you can and press OK.
Now the edge of the mask looks fantastic.
Here's an extra tip for you.
In order to remove some of the colors
that you might see on the edge of the mask, you can create a new layer.
Clip it to the layer below by pressing CTRL Alt G.
Then press the B key to enable the brush tool.
Click on this down pointing arrow and scroll up.
Under General brushes, select the soft round brush.
Then hold the Alt key to temporarily
enable the eyedropper tooland select the color of the fur.
And paint on the edge to remove the extra color on the edges.
And with a little bit of work, this is my final result.
To mask this pile of snow to make it seem
like it's sitting on these wooden panels, you might use a blending mode.
If you select Screen, black will disappear and you'll keep only the bright pixels.
But we run into two problems.
Number one is that the pile of snow becomes somewhat transparent and we can
see the background, which is not very good.
And also this is just the blend, which means that we can't actually apply
a layer style to the edges of the snow, only to the edges of the layer.
One of the ways to solve these issues is to create a channel based mask.
Let me show you how that works.
Go into the channels panel
and from here look at each individual channel and see which one has most
contrast between the foreground and background.
In this case, they're all the same,
so select any channel you want and duplicate it.
You can duplicate a channel by dragging it into the new channel icon.
Then go into image, adjustment levels
and make the background black by dragging this slider to the right.
It's already pretty black, so we don't need to worry about it.
We just need to make sure that the snow is
completely white, so you can drag the white point to the left like so.
You can drag this center point slider
to fine tune the details further if you need.
In this case, this looks pretty good.
Press OK when you're done.
Then make a selection out of the active pixels.
Here's the trick for you.
If you hold Alt and the shortcut to the right
of the channel you made, you will create a selection out of the white pixels.
In this case, holding Alt, CTRL, and the number 6.
Then you can go into the RGB and back
into the Layers panel and click on the layer mask icon to create a mask.
Notice now that the snow is not
transparent and it looks like it's sitting on those wooden panels.
Even better,
we can double click to the side of the layer and add a drop shadow
to further create the illusion that that snow is in fact over the panels.
And of course, you can adjust the settings to get better results.
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The monitor I'm using is the MSI Optix, a 4K monitor designed to produce high-quality
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The link is in the description.
The next masking trick is a bit advanced, but I'm sure you'll enjoy it.
Let me know down below in the comments if it was new to you.
First, I'll go over the Layers panel so you can see what we have.
We have a background image of New York,
a color lookup adjustment layer creating a color effect.
Then we have a group called Design,
and inside of that group we have a sticker which has been masked out already,
and it has a layer style creating an outer shadow.
Then we have a text layer with the words I love New York.
The goal is to create a mask
based on the text layer so that we can see the background through the sticker layer.
One way of doing it would be to hold CTRL
and clicking on the layer thumbnail to load the layer as a selection.
Then on the layer mask, we can fill with black.
Black is currently our background color,
so I can press CTRL and backspace to fill with black and hide those pixels.
Once I disable that text layer, we can see the hole that that layer mask creates.
The downside is that this is not editable.
For example, if the sticker now needs
to say, I love San Francisco, I cannot edit this.
I will need to recreate the entire mask from scratch.
Let me show you a way in which you can
keep the text editable and create a mask at the same time.
I'm going to undo that.
The way that you would do so is by using this really interesting feature.
You can double click to the side
of the text layer to bring up the layer style window.
From the knockout drop down, select the shallow option.
Then bring the fill opacity to zero.
This will give you exactly the same result
as creating a layer mask on the sticker layer.
Now I'll explain what's going on here.
This text layer is now acting as a layer mask, but it remains a text layer.
That means that I can enable the Type tool and edit the text.
Now I can change it to I love San Francisco, and the mask remains.
This is all possible because of the knockout feature.
Watch what happens when I change the knockout from shallow to deep.
Now we get the original color of the layer back.
Why is this happening?
The deep option makes it so the hole
is punched all the way down to the background layer, including
making a hole on the color look up adjustment layer.
If you try this and you see transparent
pixels, that's because you don't have a background layer.
Watch what happens when I click on this icon.
I now have transparent pixels.
Now this text layer is punching a hole through everything.
If you want the deep option to stop at the bottom most layer,
make sure that your bottom most layer is a background layer.
If you don't have one,
you can go into layer, New and select background from layer.
I'll
double click on the side of the text layer to bring up the layer style window
and I'll change the option from deep to shallow.
Now, the knockout or the hole it creates
will only affect the contents of the group.
Watch what happens when I bring up the color adjustment layer into the group.
One way of moving layers is by using a keyboard shortcut,
so I'll press CTRL and the right bracket key to move the layer up.
Now that the layer is inside of the group,
notice that Photoshop will cut a hole on that color lookup
adjustment layer, revealing the original color.
I'll press CTRL and the left bracket key
to move the layer down and out of the group.
Now I'm going to show you another way in which you can use the knockout method
that I'm pretty sure you haven't seen anywhere else.
I'm going to go inside of this design
group and I'm going to create a group and I'll call this group knockout mask.
Then I'll double click to the side of the group to bring up the layer style window.
From here I can change the knockout to
shallow so that this group only affects its parent group.
Then I'll change the fill opacity to zero and I'll press OK.
Now, anything that I place inside of this group
will affect the text layer and the sticker layer.
Let me show you why that's beneficial.
I'm going to create a layer and in this empty layer, I'm going to enable the brush
tool and I'll select this brush so that I can create a torn edge effect.
I'll make the brush a little bit larger
and I'm just going to paint and I'm painting with black.
The color really doesn't matter.
I could also paint with white and you'll see
that it gets the same result because all that matters are the pixels that are
on this layer acting as a mask, the knockout pixels.
That means that I can use a brush to create the knockout effect.
I could have just as easily created that effect on this layer mask,
but I'm going to show you why this method is more beneficial.
Another thing you can do is
bring in a layer and use blend If to create even more interesting masks.
I have an image here with cracks. There it is.
I'm going to drag it into the design folder.
Now, what I'm going to do is I'm going
to make this larger so that it covers the entire sticker.
Then I'll drag it into the knockout mask group, but it will disappear.
The reason that it disappears
is because the sticker is now covered by all the pixels in this layer.
I'll drag it out so that you can see what
we're going to do visually, and then I'll do it inside of the group.
What I want is I want the cracks to appear on this sticker.
How can I do that?
Well, I can double click to the side
of the layer and bring up the blend If options.
The blend If options allow you to hide and show pixels based under brightness.
Notice that the cracks are black and the wall is white,
so I can hide the white wall by clicking and dragging this slider to the left.
See how the cracks remain, but the wall disappears?
That's what I'm going to do.
But I'm going to do that inside of the group.
I'm going to click and drag this inside of the group.
Everything will disappear, of course.
But when I double click to the side
of the layer, under this layer slider, I'll do the same thing.
I'll select the white point and drag it to the left.
Notice as the wall disappears
and the crack remains, the transparency is only created where
the cracks are, and that's exactly what I want.
Also, you can hold Alt on Windows, Option on the Mac and click
to split these points in half and create a smoother transition.
Now, I have these cracks as part of my mask.
Now, I can come in here and I have some splatters here that I will use.
I'll select that and I will create a new
layer and I can now paint splatters over the image creating more holes.
Why is this beneficial?
Well, all the three layers creating this mask are separate.
So if I take this to my client, boss,
art director, and they're unhappy with the results,
they might say, This might look better without the splatters.
You can easily disable the splatters and still keep the remainder of the mask.
Or they might say, We don't like the torn edges, so you can easily get rid of those.
Or they might say, We do like the cracks, but there's some noise here.
Can you fix that? We can easily do that by going back
into the blend if options and making those adjustments like so.
Or we can remove that entirely,
something that we wouldn't be able to do with the mask.
Again, everything is editable.
You can bring everything back or you can hide it.
If all this were part of the mask, we wouldn't be able to do that.
Let me show you what I mean.
I'm going to press CTRL E to merge everything into a single layer.
Then I'll hold CTRL, click on the layer mask icon to load it as a selection.
And on this mask, on the sticker mask, I'll fill with black.
And this will visually give us the same result.
But if you change your mind and want to remove the splatters,
you can't do that because it's all in one single layer mask.
So the advantage of using the knockout on a group and using that as a mask is
that you get to keep each element editable and you can adjust it any way you want.
And on top of that,
the text remains editable so you can always type something else.