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Basics of Masks

Lesson 9 from: 10 Tools Every Beginner Needs in Photoshop

Colin Smith

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Lesson Info

9. Basics of Masks

Next Lesson: Basics of Layers

Lesson Info

Basics of Masks

so layer mosques how to lay a musk's work. I think it's pretty obvious, but it's not. So what we're gonna do is we're gonna grab the erase. It'll So we're going to go into the eraser. I don't see how we got two layers. We got one on top of the other. One is his bottom. Believe it. And others on the bottom. And when it says on top is on the top, Took about spelling things out. All right, so I grabbed the eraser tool. You know, the thing that people use to get rid of stuff, and this is what it does, You see, it hides it and you can see thing underneath. Yeah, it does look awesome. Um okay, so that told the race it'll never use it, ever. Like you can use a once in your career and then just stop. Because basically what you did is you did the digital equivalent of getting a pair of scissors and like cutting your photo out, then you want to change. Something ain't gonna happen. So what you do is you apply the frisk it. Remember? I said about the frisk it, not the biscuit, and you apply that ...

and you'll remember because now I told you with the first get you cut things out, like with the Exacto knife. Except now, when it's digital, we attach it to our layer, which means that wherever we hide that mosque means the layer underneath is gonna show wherever the mosque is showing. It's not gonna do anything. So White Mask does nothing shift key turns it on and off. You can see nothing's happening. Okay, So if we grab a black brush with your brush making black when making hard edge So it looks like that ugly a racer tool we were using and we erased The difference is that if we hide, the mosque doesn't do. If you had the out of the option key and click on the months you can see, that's what I just painted. So this is awesome because that means if I want to change my mind, I can paint with white. So to pay with white, I had the X key, which makes the white foreground color. And that means that it doesn to the layers I paid with white Look, we can paint it back. That's so cool. Okay, don't get excited. Um, OK, so wait. Grab the brush. This is where it gets interesting. So if I take this brush and we make it soft age, obviously it looks nicer. See that? No sisters conduce. No sisters could do that. Listen really blunt. Um So here's where it gets cool is if I double click on this layer here and I want to change the brightness to say 50%. I hate hit that. Remember I told you color and tone, Two different things. This is it right here. There's two things in color this hue and saturation. You is what color is at saturation has. How much is it? And then his brightness so actually just broke down color into two things. So HSB huge saturation and brightness. That's what it stands for. And that's the only thing in the photo. The B is a luminosity. The grayscale information we started with the beginning. The hue and the saturation is the color is the other part, this skinny little thin skin that goes on the top. So if I want to make something 50% gray, I choose 50% brightness That would make sense and I click OK, and now I can paint with 50% capacity. All right, now, his important thing. Whenever you choose 50% gray, it's not a true 50% gray unless you're inverted. I'm joking. It's 50% gray. I just want to see if you guys were awake. So now it's 50% awesome stuff. I want to print an exact like I go here and I want to make it late. Let's choose 30%. I choose 30% brightness in here and look at that. Uh, so that is now showing 30% capacity on that layer. If I only want to do, like, 10% of the passage e on that layer DoubleClick and change it to 10. And now I'm painting, and I'm retaining 10% on top. See that? And if you look at the months, you can see that. So that means that the amount of grey is directly related to the transparency. So that means if I want Tempus and transparency, I paint 10% black, right? Or 10% white, actually, um, so you can do that by how bright you want it. So that 50% is 50% transparent. So I always get a question. I wonder if anyone in the room there ask the question. Why don't you just change the opacity? A brush? Because people ask me that question like, Well, why you going and changing the brightness? When couldn't you just grab a brush? Dude, like, you know, changed to 50% already. I think where you have to be so difficult, you know, if you say, actually could do that. But temping five key of the six key. Well, the keys will do it like 20% of the 54 cable do 40% of 550. So, you know, let's do 50%. All right, So I'm painting with on the mosque, I paying 50% on the mask. Right. So that's awesome. Really cool. And then I do another 50% 0 what happens now? It's 100. Okay, how am I get a unified that this is Just have a look at this here for a second, So I wanna unify this. You tried to unify this. So look at this old blotchy. Why is there blotchy? I thought 50% was supposed to be 50% opacity. That's because if you use 50% capacity on the brush, it's gonna paint at 50% capacity, and in the next time I do it, it's gonna do another 50% opacity. So if I do Tempus incapacity and I paint on their 10 times, it's gonna build it up to 100% capacity, right? And if I have precious is City would turn on my pen, which I do. It's even more, but check this out. If I go here and I choose Tempus in brightness, it don't care. It's going to do 10% actually, 10 off pressure and to pass it up 200. So it's not double affecting it. And I paint healer. It doesn't care. That's 10% all the time, baby. Don't care. And if I make it like, say, 80% which is gonna be 80% brightness, by the way, Look at this. I paint, and now it's gonna be exactly that. So then, and if I turn it on to the layer, you can see. So that's why doing that brightness, because it's gonna choose an absolute value. It's not gonna be based on how much anchors on their paint or digital pixels are on their before it's going to be based on that shade of grand is gonna give me an exact thing. So moving on to something more sexy now that you understand that, well, don't so grab the Grady until grab it here in a choose foreground to background linear grading and normal mode, 100% opacity. If I pull that across, it creates these beautiful, smooth blends. Look at this and you can just blend it. Little short movement will make it very abrupt along with Michael. Make it soft and to that. So now we can use this for blending because we know that the transparency, the record proportional to the shed gray. And so now we're applying a black to white radiant. It creates this beautiful Let's move, blend option key. You can see it right there. So how does that apply in real life in real life? If we take this picture here and I drag it into the other picture and I resize it and I go here and I hold down the shift key to constrain it never scale something about hitting shift. Otherwise, you get this. We don't want that toe control T or command tea for free transform popular in the middle here, by the way, another tip. If you want to put it in the middle, drag weight move. Hold the shift key and we'll drop it in the middle. So if I had control T or command T don't. I saw someone to this armor. I wanted to eat my own flash. It was so painful. They were like, they're trying to scare and they're like each corner, uh, on. And then I did the sides. They wouldn't unit did the set alarms like so horrible hit control to your command. T hold down the shift key to constrain it. And in the option people dragging from the middle Just a once. Now we go. Inefficiency drives me nuts. All right, So moving on, as you can tell because I'm very efficient with my words today. Talk to me normally and your you anyway, So we're gonna add a layer mask by clicking on the new layer mask icon. And now we've created a mask and we're gonna selected the D key for default to reset the foreground background colors Grab the grating until and now we can click and drag, and we can create these beautiful collages. Look at that. It looks like I spent hours on that image. And, um, you know, I mean to a grandmother. Grandmother is gonna think he's been hours on it and we have to get this beautiful piece of art. It was just so simple. It was like three clicks basically. And then if you want to, like, make something more solid, you can grab the black brushes we learned before, You know, black hides that level white will show it. So this grandpa wide grab a brush, not soft edged brush. And because I'm using a pressure sensitive tablet for those of you who are we can get to the brushes panel shows something. So under brushes here, we got sitting. See, we're going to shape dynamics, which usually, like, if you're doing this, usually end up making it look horrible, Turn it off and transfer capacity pin pressure. Now, when I say that the shape dynamics, what they do is if you press hard, it gives you a thicker line. If you press thin, it gives you a thinner line, enables you to create tapered lines like that. You know, like telegraphed. Where is your doing it This way With the capacity, it's like a pencil you can shade things in and make it look nice. So if you're not aware like you've got that other one on, are you trying to shaded and you pin size is changing. Sometimes it's hard to create a smooth grading, so just be aware of that. There's, like a whole thing there on brushes and, you know, I have tons of tutorials and only these things. Um, you know, I got YouTube videos on my channel, which is finished up cafe on all this stuff. Bet right now, if we just focus on these two, which is the shape dynamics and the transfer right, so intended shapes off. We're gonna do transfer. And what we can do is go up here. And if I paint with white, I can paint back in the areas of a face. They don't want to be more permanent so that so you can manually touch it up. So sometimes a good idea to start with that Grady it and then you can manually go in there and, you know, just tweak it and make it a beautiful piece of art.

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Colin is a Photoshop expert and shares answers to the top ten questions he's been asked, it was a great class!​

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Just watched the Live Class of this course, and it is by far the most entertaining and interesting class. There is no time for anything except to learn learn learn, Colin is a great instructor, he answered so many of my questions about Photoshop and explained every feature thoroughly (without losing my attention, mind). Thank you very very much!

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