Lessons

Lesson Info

Creating a Layer Mask with the Brush Tool

Let's see here, what do I wanna do? I kinda wanna get rid of that sky behind there 'cause that little bit of halo is kind of bugging me. I'm allowing some of that halo because I know the sky I'm gonna put in behind is gonna be way darker. So I'm not stressed about this. If I was putting in a really, really bright shiny, sun shiny background, of course I would have lit it differently first. But I also would have created a situation where masking this hair would have been with more contrast so that I could get the definition a little bit more clearly. One thing that I'm not super loving is that I wish I'd remembered, and this happens a lot, I'm sure this happens to other people to, where sometimes I forget to do the liquefy work first that I wanted to do. So in this case, I totally forgot. So I have to fix some of this masking here anyway, so I'm going to do, I'm gonna right click on this mask. I'm gonna say disable layer mask. I'm not deleting it, but I'm disabling it. Which just means ...

I'm gonna have to go in and do a little bit of tweaking afterwards. So I'm gonna go hit the marquee tool. I'm gonna make sure that I'm selected on the model. Highlighting the model and control shift X or command shift X for you crazy Mac users. And so, I'm just gonna fluff this out just a tiny little bit and I'm gonna bring that little bit of fabric here on her hip. Taking a brush. Because this shirt is a little bit big on her. She's not that big naturally. I mean, you guys saw her earlier. She's like doink. (laughs) Little tiny thing. So, that's just like enough, little bit of foofiness going on there. I might see about pulling that down a little bit. And I might fluff her hair a little bit, which means I have to do a little bit of work again in masking, but... Actually, better idea. I'm not gonna touch the hair. This is my brain on editing. I'm gonna edit the hair once I put the sky in because I can actually, I know that I can make that manipulation, and a little fix of flex in the sky. I've got room, I can get away with it so I'm not gonna remask her hair but I'm just gonna touch up that part of the skirt that I edited. So I've manipulated her. I'm gonna right click and I'm gonna go enable layer mask. So my mask is gonna be not totally accurate right now. Which is fine. And let's just mask this out a little bit because we have to fix, we have to fix some of this stuff anyways. So I'm gonna grab my brush. This is where everything gets really boring. I went over her arm a little bit. I need to increase the hardness. I'm letting it wrap around a little bit there because I know I can get away with it and I know that it'll be fine. I'm gonna increase my flow a touch. I'm just sliding around here. So obviously I can't see where I made the skirt bigger, so I'll just go and invert my mask and I'll make it a little bit too big here. Or sorry, invert the color of the brush. I'm leaving the mask alone. I'm inverting the color of the brush. (laughs) Do do do. If you don't talk to yourself when you're editing, you're lying to yourself because I promise you do. (laughs) I didn't notice how much I talk to myself while I was editing until I started recording tutorials, which eventually will be released through my website. I'm working on one on masking but I realized, oh my god, I have like an internal dialogue with myself that I didn't even know existed. (laughs) I was listening to it afterwards and I was like, oh man. I'm like cutting out chunks, like sentences with sound and everything and like oh my god. (laughs) Gonna be a crazy person. So yeah. This is why I actually like editing, like cutting this stuff out by hand because it's nice and smooth. I am still being a little bit rough, I know I'm missing some spots, but... Just trying to give you guys something here relatively interesting. So this edge here I don't like 'cause it's not real to reality. It's not accurate. So I'm just gonna soften it a little bit. The reason for that is look at these rocks that are around here and look at how long, how quick the, how many pixels the transition of color is. It's not just one pixel to the next, which is what a lot of these hard edge editing software does. And of course there's refine edge, yes, we know. But I have never really loved refine edge because I can't change it spot by spot by spot as easily as I can just do this. And so see here, we have a little bit of fabric coming through. So this area here might be semi-transparent, so what I like to do is I go in with like, a low flow brush. Not low enough. One. And I will just lightly allow through a little bit of that. So, that was at 1% flow because zooming out we might see a little bit of it. It's just a detail that neurotic me if I printed it at 60 by 90 I would notice, but like, that grain looks weird. Here a question, what's up? Yeah, now that you're coming to the shadow, do you always, or just sometimes delete out the shadow? I'm gonna delete out the shadow and I'm gonna bring it back. Show you what's up. Yeah, we're gonna get to that. Shadows are super important. Shadows are totally their own animal, but right now we just gotta make sure that the mask itself, the original mask, is solid. So I'm gonna increase this again. Make sure we're sitting here nice and pretty and I'm mostly just paying attention to the edges. Yes, what's up? Just kind of a side note question. I was just curious. Is there a specific reason why you choose PC over Mac? Yeah, because Mac doesn't make anything strong enough. I get this question a lot. I get it a lot. Let's talk about that as you're still doing that. (laughs) Yeah. Can you talk a little bit while you're doing your thing about the computer and what it took to get it custom made for you? Yeah, Macintosh wishes they could make something this awesome, but they don't make it that awesome. So I find for people who do a lot of really high-end work, these things, PCs are super customizable and you can make total powerhouses out of them. So that's why I'm PC. I know the operating system in Macintosh is far more stable, but I've used Macs and I'm always overheating them and nothing irritates me more than being limited by technology. I do not want my computer to be the thing that's holding me back from doing the work that I need to do. A year and a half ago, I had an ASUS that I love. I mean, I love ASUS computers. I can't fault them even tiny little bit. They have great gear. But I was sitting watching this thing render, like a brush stroke across the screen for like 25 seconds and I was just losing it. There's not too many ways that I lose my cool epically but that's one of them. And so, when Puget came along, we designed a custom computer. So this thing's got three SSD drives in it. It has 42 gigs, 32 gigs of RAM inside of it and I forget the graphics card, but it's also equally awesome. But basically, a lot of people were like, "Oh well, you know, why didn't you go Mac?" Because everyone has this illusion that high-end people use Mac which actually isn't really the case. The really, really, really high-end studios, especially high-end compositing studios such as Legendary Studios and Digital Demand and all of those guys, their compositing departments are all PCs because they can run Linux on it and Linux is free, and then they run Nuke. So they can basically soup these things up with all the crazy amount of power they need necessary and continue on. So that's why I use a PC because Mac just doesn't cut it. Does Macintosh work for tons and tons and tons and tons and tons of people? Yes. But it's a total illusion that all people who do creative work use Macintosh because it's just not the case. Actually, yeah, Pritik who does Solstice Retouch, the guy who does the amazing beauty retouch workshop here on CreativeLive is a PC guy for his heavy-duty work. He has a custom PC at home. Well, at his work studio. So yeah. It's this ongoing battle online. Everyone, I think it's really funny when I teach workshops and I'm like the only PC in the room. Everyone (laughs) else is Mac. But PC users unite. I know you're out there. (laughs) You're not alone. Yeah, we're getting closer, guys. So much closer. There's a reason why I picked skirts for this because I knew they would be relatively easy to cut out. I didn't wanna deal with legs. There's only so much masking you can handle before everyone starts to fall asleep or they start going to YouTube. (laughs) SO in this case here with her arm, I'm just softening that edge a little bit. A little bit too much there. (sighs) Instead of 13, let's go down to 5% flow again. Nice and soft. Alrighty. So I'm gonna click alt. Click on that and so I noticed there's like a little bit of texture thing going on here with her elbow. That's because the mask isn't clear, so... I could also do that technique that I was talking about yesterday. The dodge and burning on the mask works pretty well. Aha, see. This is why I like hitting alt 'cause then I can see what I missed. 'Cause it totally happens. On the topic of the gear, actually, there was a really funny comment thread on Facebook yesterday on one of my friend's profiles between, it was like PC versus Mac. So all the PC users were rallying together and all the Mac users were rallying together. (laughs) That was funny. So I'm just gonna go to my dodge tool. For those of you who were watching yesterday, if you missed this yesterday, you're gonna have to watch it. But, I'm just, oops, not mid tones. Hitting the dodge tool on the highlights. Just cleaning up that edge a little bit. Make sure I'm hitting this. And I'm not gonna get this little tiny piece around the corner because that was intentional. So I'm noticing here, this here is all still kind of splotchy, right? So I'm gonna use the burn tool. Make this nice and big. Make sure it's set to shadows. Let's crisp that stuff up a little bit. Alt click. There we go. So, alrighty. We have our subject. It's looking not too bad. It's a good start. What do you guys think? Alright. So I spent all this time working on this mask. I like to be able to save said mask project. So like, have the high res version of her saved. Control J. Let's just duplicate. Mask save. So I'm gonna stick these two guys into a group. So highlight them both, control G or command G, which is group. Save stuff. So this basically means if I'm screwing around on something and I totally screw something up, I have got all of my hard work saved so I don't have to do it again. I learned this the hard way from so many times. (laughs) I was working on something and then I botched the mask or something like that and then I was like, oh my god, I have to do all that work all over again. Sad panda. The other thing I'm gonna do is now that my mask is finished, I'm saving. File, save, file save. I'm gonna save this as a psb as opposed to a psd. It's a large document format. That means that if we wind up going over two gigs on this, which is a possibility, it's gonna save properly still going forward. I'm also turning off the maximized compatibility. So here, this is something that I wasn't able to cover yesterday. But today, I turn off maximized compatibility because I know that I'm just gonna be working on this file on this computer in this version of Photoshop. That means that this file size is gonna be a lot smaller. So that's kind of handy. (laughs) Renee, could you please give us another explanation, reiterate on psb please. Yes. So psd files have a max size limit save of two gigabytes. Psb files don't have that size limitation. That's the only thing, the only difference I know about the two. I'm sure there's more, but all I know is that when I was first getting into making Photoshop composites and they started to get around the two gig mark and I started getting over it, I noticed that things weren't able to save anymore. It was like epic crash fail, you can't save this file because it's too big. And then somebody told me about psb and I was like, aw, this changes everything. So use a psb file. I'm sure a tiff file would probably also work as well.