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Layer Masks – Karen on Beans

Lesson 17 from: FAST CLASS: Photoshop for Beginners: Essential Training

Mark Wallace

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Lesson Info

17. Layer Masks – Karen on Beans

Mark demonstrates more advanced techniques for using layers, layer masks, selection tools, the free transform tool, and blending modes. We’ll take Karen and put her on beans.

Lesson Info

Layer Masks – Karen on Beans

Now it's time to learn about one of the most powerful tools in Photoshop, that is layer masks. And so to do this, we're gonna revisit what we did before, Karen on beans! What we do need to do is to take this background layer and unlock it, so make sure you click that so this says layer zero. So what you should have now is beans, unlocked layer and then Karen also on an unlocked layer. So I'm gonna double click my hand to make sure that Karen is filling the screen here. Okay. Now what we need to do is we need to take those beans and we need to move them over onto the same document on a new layer. It's very, very simple. All we have to do is go over here to the beans window and get our Move tool. Now, you can do one of two things, either way is gonna work just fine. You can grab the layer right here and drag it, or what you can do is you can grab the image and drag it, just drag it all the way up, don't let go of your mouse until you hit the Karen tab, it should appear. Don't let go of y...

our mouse, drag it over on top of Karen and then let go of your mouse and then you'll see that the beans show up. Now, you'll notice that these beans are above Karen on a new layer, and they're not big enough. These beans need to cover all of Karen. So we're gonna use something we just learned about, the Free Transform tool. Remember that the shortcut key is Command or Control T. We get that bounding box there that we had before. Let's just drag that up so it's outside the Karen image, drag this down so it's covering all of Karen, then we'll hit the check mark there, so we accept that. We just have to have these beans on top. Now, we're gonna go over to our Layers Pallet, drag the beans below Karen. Okay, now, here's where layer masks come in handy. So remember, before, we selected all the white hair and we deleted it and then we could see the beans behind Karen, but that is destructive. We can never get that white area back. We wanna do a non-destructive edit and we can do that using something called a layer mask. So the first thing we need to do is we need to select Karen and so we can do that in a very simple way. So we just go over here to our Magic Wand tool and then we click on the white background and we've selected the white background. Remember, we need to select Karen, not the background and so we need to go in here and go to Select Inverse. Now we have Karen selected and not the background selected. Okay. Once we have Karen selected, all we have to do now is go over here to the Layers Pallet and all the way down at the bottom, next to the effects is this little square with a hole in it. So remember I showed you at the beginning of all this layer stuff a little piece of paper with the hole in it? This allows you to have layers with holes in them. That's this is, it's a layer mask. So I'm going to click on that, and kapowie! We can see the beans! But look! Over here, if you look on the thumbnail, I'm gonna zoom in on this really fast. So if I zoom in on this, notice that we have two things here, this is our layer thumbnail, so this is Karen and then next to that, we have this, this is the layer mask. So anything in the layer mask that is black is transparent and anything that is white is opaque. So anything that's white, you see, anything that's black, you don't see and so these two things are locked. So if I move one of these, it moves the other along with it. You can unlock that if you need to in the future, but let's work with this layer mask so you can see how this magic works. The other thing that's really important to understand is, when you're working on a layer, if you click on the layer mask, you might get the wrong results. So, be really intentional. Are you clicking on the layer or are you clicking on the layer mask? Right now, we wanna work on the layer mask. Now, let me show you how this works. So I'm gonna grab my pen tool here and then what I wanna do is, I'm just gonna zoom in a little bit. So I'm gonna zoom in so we can see some of this area here around Karen's hair and sort of around her head, this kind of stuff. Okay. I am on the layer mask. Notice I'm not on Karen, I'm on the mask, that's what's outlined here over here on the Layers Palette. Now again, anything that's white, you can see, anything that's black is transparent. So I can go over here to my default, foreground and background color. Remember they're black and white, if they're not, hit D, so you get black and white and then I'm going to get a brush. So I've got this big brush right here, now I have white and when I paint on the layer mask, I need to make sure my flow is set to 100% so when I paint on this layer mask, notice I'm bringing in the background that we got rid of. So it's still there. I can put it in and put it out. If I want to take that away, I change the color from white to black by hitting X. So now the foreground color is black and now when I paint on that, notice that it's going away so I can paint this area out and so using a layer mask, you can paint things in and paint things out of a layer and you can do that anywhere you want in a mask. So let's say, I want Karen's eyeballs to be beans, I can do that. So I'm gonna get a very small brush here and so I need to paint black on the mask so that her eyes disappear. So I'm going to paint, and when I do, notice that the beans come through so we're basically poking holes in that piece of paper. So I've got a bean there, that looks really weird and I'm painting right here and I guess that's a very dark bean over here. Okay, so now she's got bean eyes and if I make a mistake, whoops, that's okay. I change, remember over here, my foreground color's black, my background color's white, if I hit X, now I've got white as my foreground color. Now I can just paint and undo this thing that I did and if I don't like that she's got coffee bean eyes, I can paint with white to bring her eyeballs back, so now her eyeballs are back. And so with a layer mask, you can paint in and paint out different areas of a layer.

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