Lessons

Lesson Info

1:45 pm - More Masking

So far, what we've worked with masks we've mainly painted on the mask or started with a selection and just used it. Sometimes I use masks to make it look as if a layer is going blow one object yet above another object receiving shea what I'm talking about in this particular thing notice that this red shape is on top of everything else because it is the top most layer here because of that, this layer stacks this layer can on ly be it's one particular position in that stack of layers and if I want this little end right here toe look a ziff it's below the other layer that's there if I move it within the layer, stack intel it below it didn't just move it below that part. It also moved it below over here and it also moved it below over there, the entire layer got moved down. Well, what if I wanted to look like it's a blow here but above there I wanted to look like it's simultaneously below in one area and above and another you can't do that with layers unless you were to copy this piece ont...

o its own layer so it could be up on top and the rest of it could be on a different layer down below, but we can cheat and we can simulate that look but using later masks all I'm going to do is hide this layer with a layer mask wherever I wanted to look as if it's below makes sense so there's a couple tricks, I'm going to go to the layer that contains this shape, and if you look at my layers, it's hard to tell which layer that is visually by just looking at the thumbnails because they all look like they're red. The color is added through layer style it's called color overlay here, but I could look at the names I do have yellow smoosh green solutions so on, but there's a different way weaken target layers if you're in the move tool and you move your mouse on top of a layer visually within your document there's a way to get photoshopped to target the top most layer that contains something right there the way you do it is you have to be in the move tool and then hold on the command key that's controlling windows I haven't held down right now if I command clicquot in the move to a watch what happens in my layers panel command, click do you see how it just grabbed the swish called pinks? Wish if I command, click over here on this one it just grab the purple one if I command click on the yellow one it just grab that all it's doing is looking at the contents of your document and saying what is the top most layer that contains something right where your mouse is and it's making whatever layer that is active and so if you ever creating a complex composite and you need to switch between things truly nice people didn't know how to very quickly target uh those layers that makes us think you guys like to see three pen's moving up here you're doing it you're putting your head yeah it was command clicking fbn the move tool and that's control clicking if your windows so after you do that just here where the moment you click you don't even have to release the mouse button you could start dragging if you wanted to reposition all these layers just click and drag and you could move all this stuff around so if you ever have a complex composite a lot of floating pieces you want to move him around feel free to do so I'll choose undo to get back one other trick related to that is sometimes you want to move more than one layer so if I command click on one to make an active usually if I command click on another it switches which later zach but if you add the shift key so I'm holding on to keys now both the command key and the shift key then I could get two layers active see how moving to now or do it again to another layer, and now I have three layers active, so you can very quickly target of many layers you want. So the shift part means either add this layer to what's already selected, or take this layer out of what's already selected when it comes to your layers. So what the heck does that have to do with making this thing looks like it's woven because I don't need to move the layers right now, and I only want to work in that one layer that contains the red swoosh. Well, let's, see what we can do let's target the red layer like his command clicked on it, making active let's add a mask so we can use that mask to hide various areas. Here's the trick I would like to hide this red swoosh where it looks as if it goes above the yellow one here, but below it there to accomplish that, I don't want to have to sit here in pain, to be precise, so we're going to cheat command. Click on the layer that contains the yellow swoosh to make it active so I could find it and there was a way to get a selection out of a layer. I don't know if you remember it we've used it a couple times today you can move your mouse on top of the thumbnail if you hold on the command key control on windows and click, it gives you a selection of what's in that layer. Then I'll return to the mask that's attached to my red swoosh grab my paintbrush, knowing that that selection will limit where I can paint, I can only paint in the air that selected, and now I can paint right here. I can't get any paint on that curved part of the switch was not part of this election, and I could just say, hide that part, then I'm going to come to the next one let's see, I wanted to go every other one so it's over under over under so let's see here it's over there, it's under here, it's over so therefore this should be under that makes sense, so I'm going to target that layer by command clicking on to just find out where it is. I'm going to get a selection out of that layer by command, clicking on its thumb now and then I'll go to the mask for the layer that contains the red stuff, and that selection will prevent me from painting outside the lines, and I could just do this. Now you notice that the effect that was applied to the red object changed when I did that you see, it kind of morphed around it's kind of weird I'll talk about why that happens and how to prevent it once we're done getting this to weave so then let's see, we went below here so in the next one want to go above so here we're above we want to go below that part though, so I need to find this layer go to my move tool command clicking the layer targeted man clicking the mask to get this election or not the mask the thumb now go back to what we were doing we went below this one should be above so that should be below when I'm working on this kind of images when it's really useful to have bad television because this is when my brain after looking through all of these look at how many things you have to go through to fix this is going to turn to mush so then if I would go and look back to bad television it's going to entertain me for please five minutes enough to get my brain to have a break and allow me to be able to come back to this and think about it so let's see what we've done a little bit off we went above blow above below above, below, above, below above and I'm gonna stop they're okay because it's just not fun to watch, right? All right um, so it is time to see toe learn this is awesome, we'll also oftentimes the main thing is you want it to look as if a layer goes below one thing and above another and just working with on ly the stacking order in the layers panel it's just doesn't seem to be possible sometimes, so if that's the case, then we're just going to hide the layer wherever it should look as if it goes below something and that can help us out there's only one other thing we need to solve in this particular image and that is why the heck did this effect that's applied here change when I hid uh, the area right here and there's a reason for that? What it is is it doesn't know there's any other layers in the image and the effect that supplied to it, which is bevel in boss usually applies wherever the shape of that layer shows up with you look at just this layer it's got a hole in it right there, and it thinks therefore that this is a physically separate peace from this and that the effect should reflect that that these would be like to pieces, but there's a way we can cheat the way we can cheat is if we have that layer active we could go to the letters fx and choose blending options to get into the same dialogue box where were you earlier found our blend if sliders remember those in here there are some options that nobody ever uses I challenge you to find somebody that uses this I can show you use for it not going to today I don't think but nobody uses that search the internet for a purpose for it you're not going to find anybody that uses it but there was some stuff in here that nobody uses that's actually useful there's one in here that's called later mask hides effects layer mask hides effects the effects are things like drop shadow bevel in boss you know that whole list that you have in that menu if this has turned off the layer mass doesn't hide the effects the layer mass causes the object that's not layered have a hole in it which makes the effects go right around the you know thinking there's a hole in it but if I choose layer mask eyes effects what it means is when we poke that hole with later mask the layer effects shouldn't react if you just hide the effect not make it change its shape so layer mask ieds effects is what's going to allow us to do that without getting it to screw up so turn our other layers back on now and now that looks fine instead of having a weird, really weird looking thing going on there so I found that in the same place where you find the blending sliders so same methods used to get there you could go to the letters fx choose blending options and it's right there later mascots effects same thing we could use on a simpler image that one was too much for you. Well, here's, that image we had earlier this one the look of the images mainly layer effects if I turn off the effects it's a blue shape if you ever want to learn a lot about these things they're called later effects or layer styles to create cool looking stuff like this look into a friend of mine, jack davis if you ever has classes here he loves playing with those things and he's really good at figuring out how they go together. I wrote a book with jack quite a long time ago and I just noticed that was one of the things that he was very good at. I was thinking about these budding when this got drop shadow and outer glow color over later changes color satin just a little middle thing, innit? Inter globe in her shadow one of boss all of it added together makes this well if I have a layer mask sitting here and I paint on the mask do you see how that effect just changed when I painted in the mask, but she's undo it just thought that, hey, this was a moon shaped now, and therefore it should come around like that. But if I go to the letters that fax and say blending options and that later mass should hide the effects that shouldn't affect where they show up now we have the exact same effects it's just that the mask is hiding those effects so it's useful option to know about if you use those layers styles a lot so a quick question on the masking here that kind of goes back to the spartan objects discussion from this morning, sm, sm says, I wonder if you could do that masking to the original smart object, so that would replicate on all of the identical curves, so you only need to do it once instead of over and over again said, is that the case? Uh, I would have to think through this particular image to do that, but it off the top of my head, it makes sense as long as I have the right number of these where that, you know, I'm going every other to go under over under over is long as I have aa would be an even number of them, because if I have an odd number than it would suddenly start not being right so we have to do math yeah and therefore I'm not doing that so it would be nice if we were to think about that apply being able apply to only one and then I have it right in the rotation so I'll be a great way to do it the main theories if you pick the right pictures think about it at the right time so that you can do it all that then possibly not be pretty cool if you did all right one other thing about layer masks so far all we've worked with layer masks we've painted on a mask where we started with a selection before we put things into a mask sometimes I want to put a picture in a mask initially when you might want to do that um this is probably way too small but I'm gonna grab this image I'm just going to select on copy I want to use that as my mask because instead of painting with a paintbrush tool, why not just take a sheet of paper like this and rich people ask how you make it look like rip paper we're gonna rip paper and then put it on a black background so that you can you know, if I do this right now take my iphone and pointed out that choking and then get that in further shop why not paste that into a mask if white makes things show up in black makes things disappear I could therefore make my picture show up inside the shape and I'm gonna have that deck allege around my picture does that make sense or in this case why not get a pad of watercolor paper a big brush the kind of russian might paint the outside of your house with and I think I think dip it in tip the brush and the ink and just paint out once the brush starts getting a little dry paint off near the edges so you get just the streaks kind of stuff I don't know if this will be appropriate for our image as faras its shape but we'll find out I just selected on copied now we get this picture I want to apply it to this is in that same area where all the temples are that had in some other images just little better time of day as faras lighting goes, I can't add a land mass to the background so double click on the name to change it and then I'm going to add a lair mask. Now you might think when you look in layers panel that the layer mask is active with those you know because the edges are like that and so if you paint that's where your paint goes, so if I paced you'd think the picture would go in there but it doesn't if I just tight command vita paced the picture always shows up with its own layer the trick is in order to get a picture into the mask, the mask must be visible on your screen. That means I think either the overlay with that backslash key would work or instead option click on the mask so you're viewing it then you can paste into it now I think the image I'm using here is a little small but that's ok on a mask most the time when I'm doing something like this I want a soft edge in the masked man in a crisp one and if I scale this up will be fine all it's going to do is end up with edges that air slightly soft that's a weird overlay to see mr turner and her I'm not sure why should weird looking overly but anyway I scale it up there and now it's in the mask in the only way to get it in that mask was to make sure the mask was visible before I chose paste so that means either backslash which puts it on an overlay on your picture or option clicking on the mask now if black hides things, the white shows things we got a problem and that is this is going to make the edge of the picture show up in the middle disappear is not also the middle is not solid black I can see stuff in there which means it's not going to completely disappear he would partially disappears there's a couple things we need to d'oh I'm just going to select on copy this because I want to use it for something else in a few minutes and not related to making the image show up just for something else and what we're going to need to do is two things the first thing is I'm going to invert this if you want to see what it looks like I'm going to show you I'll stop healing the mask black hides thinks the middle parts black but what I'm going to do is adjust it and choose invert invert means making a negative if you watch the layers panel look at where the black stuff is you see I just switched it but you can see how the middle you can see three slightly can't you see a hint of a checker board and that's because I look at the mask it's not white in the middle I can see detail so all we need to do is choose image adjustments levels and we're going to adjust the mask with levels the slider in the upper right forces areas toe white so if I pull it over far enough we should be able to get it so that center truly became solid white and I could grab the middle one that's going to control the transition whatever I'd like then a simplified things I might put a layer underneath. I'm just going to create what's called a solid color layer, not that color, and I'll put it underneath you could put anything under there just so you can see it, and then to make this look a little more interesting, you could style it, you could go over here and how to drop shadow these air completely optional steps crop shadow you could add a devil in boss all that kind of stuff. They get the idea that you can start with a ripped sheet of paper, or you can start with the next time you spill coffee on your table cloth, go take a picture of it and place it into a mask, and suddenly you can have your picture inside that shape. You know, eso when I'm walking around, not only am I taking pictures of textures that I see on walls in clouds that I see in skies, anytime I see interesting shapes where it is a dark shape on a light background or the other way around, I'm taking pictures of it, so I've seen stripes painted on the parking lot. You know, the parking like park your car between these lines, kind of lines that the the paint when it went down get all speckled and looked really cool I'm taking pictures of it knowing I can pace that into a mask and use it to make my pictures show up inside that shape and I do that in all sorts of things and I'm just constantly searching out that kind of stuff is one final thing you remember? I copied the image earlier I'm just going to paste it remember that and I could take that and do something like in boss it try to bring out a little bit of that texture I'm looking only at the middle I don't care about the edges and then I could use a bloody mode to say apply that texture what's underneath so I'm just going to be on the move tool remember shift plus and minus to cycle through the modes ignore the edges, there's way too much white out there. I'll mask that out just like in the middle in here? Hmm let's see, you see some of the texture being applied. It was going to find whatever might maybe I wanted to look like that so it's more like a painting or something. I'm going to use that screen mode and I could just add a mask and just say don't apply out on the edges um yeah don't apply a way out here just apply in the middle I could lower the opacity that could do all sorts of things, you know, make it look different, maybe like it going all the way out it's up to you. The main thing is to experiment and don't find that you're stuck painting on a mask were making selections pay stuff in there so I create a bunch of these these are really old ones. I mean, I made these years ago, but I can put pictures in them. I take paper. Do you see that shape on the edge? Well, that could be my picture in there and just make a bunch of that stuff so that you always have the opportunity. There's one other thing I could bring up as far as the mask goes and that is let's say that I have this I like this, but I just need to move the picture so I grab the move tool and I moved the picture. But do you notice that not only did the picture move, but the shape were constraining it within moved along with did not maybe what I need to do a scaled down the pictures so that it fits within that frame better because right now, it's kind of hitting here, right? Well, I typed command t to transform not only does the image gets smaller, but so does the mask right well, if you look in the layers panel, do you see a link symbol linking the two together? Just click on it, turn off now you're either going to scale the image or the mask, not both that link symbol is what was causing it to move at the same time and to scale or transformative same time I don't want to let go of that now either the image or the mask can be manipulated, so that means that now for grab my move tool I can move that layer around independent of the mask so I moved too far all run out of image, but maybe I come in here and I transform it to get smaller so looks little better in there but at the top I don't have enough anymore, so maybe I just come up here and I transformed it back, but I used content aware remember how he did that before with like balloons in the blue sky expanding well, let's see, I'm not sure, but there we can get it to go back up to fill that back out okay, so if you ever need to move it scale it rotated that kind of stuff and you don't want the mask to be moved scale to rotated that's when you click in between the two to get rid of the links symbol the link symbol is there by default so that made it so I could reposition, reposition this better. If I choose undo a few times, it used to look like that. But by being ableto unlinked them and think nicely about it, I was able to get it tio more better, lee, be framed, or you want to say.