thecomputersociety.org

. The chief advantage of using layer masking is that it is non-destructive, unlike erasing or other operations on layers. The original layers are left untouched so if you make a mistake you can go back and fix it in a trivial manner. It is a big time saver.

Let us take a look at this. First open two photos in Photoshop.

Copy the photo of a glass into the ocean photo. It shows we now have two layers in the ocean photo. We have the original ocean as a background and the glass on top as Layer 1.

In the Layers palette we click on the create Layer Mask button o the bottom. It looks like rectangle with a circle in it, as shown below.

We can Unmask the background photo of the ocean by using the paint brush tool, set to black as the foreground color.

See here black as foreground

When we paint with black the glass photo on top is not erased just having its masking qualities removed where we paint. See the ocean scene revealed.

Let us say we made a mistake in showing the ocean scene below the glass we switch the foreground color to white and when we paint the mask returns.

Foreground set to white here

See the photo below to check out how painting with white restores the glass photo and hides or masks the ocean once again.

Let us now set the foreground color to gray.

Foreground set to gray

Gray is a midpoint between white and black and allows various transparency. If you look closely at the photo below you can see that the glass is now transparent and shows the ocean coming through,

If we mess with the photo more using black to unmask, white to restore and various grays to make transparent we get something like the photo below.

Layer masks are far more involved than this but this is its most simple form.

thecomputersociety.org