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Lesson Info

Clipping Masks

Now, uh the moment or talk about clipping mask and this these photos have athlete nothing to do with that it's just I want to have photo my puppy up on the screen because that's always a good thing because he's so cute seven months old today happy birthday, riley actually, there was a couple days ago, but any way you look at him he's so cute. Okay, so layer masks are an interesting function as we saw because you can always create a layer mask just by how you paint and it's that whole address I remember black, white and gray and the influence they have on a mask, so if I were to open a file and you'll see very often I'm going through camera raw because I take a lot of my photos in raw format just because of the option it gives me, but ultimately, of course that's still opens and photoshopped so let's just compare the difference between a mask done in the ways we're talking about now in this new different topic of a clipping mask. So I want to have this photograph not be just the whole t...

hing I want to make it as if it's within maybe a shape or something like that so there's a couple of ways I could do it if I added layer mask and then on the layer mass, for example said let's just for the sake of argument make oval selection I have to think about ok, if I want to mask that part, I have to fill it with black, so if I fill that with black then what's going to happen is I'm gonna have a big hole in the middle of my photographs, so my layer mask clearly is the wrong way around, so I really want an oval version this photograph, so I have to invert the mass commanded control I to end up with this effect. The whole photo is still there as we know and this layer mask it's the fact that it's white and black that's causing it to look the way that it does. If I decide, for example, that I want to edit it, I'd have to unlinked the layer and the mass that I could do things like if we transform and if I make the mask bigger it's going to you have that effect or I could also take a paintbrush and just start painting wherever I want the image to appear. So when you're doing things like one things we talked about with layer mass was taking a photograph and kind of selectively adjusting brightness and darkness by using adjustment layers and painting on the mask that's the real benefit of a layer mask, however, for certain things it doesn't work as well, so let's take a little bit of a different tact here and what if I said what I really want to do is make it look like this photograph is on ly inside some letters? So if I tried to you that with a traditional layer mask it would be a challenge I mean, I could do it, but it would end up looking like this I'd have to use a very unusual tool we hardly ever use anymore in photo shop, which is the horizontal type mask tool I didn't know that existed and what that does is it it still looks like initially regular text and nice and big so we can see it but you see what it does, it actually creates a selection that then same on deal on the mask I could fill it with black and it's the wrong way around, so I inverted so eventually I end up with this effect of the metal photo inside the letters and because the difference in size the good news is I can move it around little bit that's kind of interesting. So I do all of this and then I look at it and say, you know, I wish I used a thicker font well that this point it's not type anymore it's a mask that looks suspiciously like type, so if there's anything about this tax, I don't like my only option is to start over again which is ok but I'd much rather not have to do that and that's where a clipping mass comes in the way a clipping mass works is unlike a layer mass that's based on shades of gray a clipping mask is based entirely on the shape it doesn't matter what the color is or anything like that it just says I'm going to take step open it so reorient everything here I would take some shape and it's the shape of that layer that's going to cause them asking to take place and the one part of it that's a little tricky at first is the way you orient your layers for this to happen with a layer mask it's part of the same layer so I clicked on this layer and said at a mass to it with a clipping mask it's initially a separate layer that you clip together as it is it worth way they refer to it so I go back that's all time I'll use the regular type tool do the same text now it happens by default that my type is black but could be purple or pink or green doesn't matter what matters is the position of the layers and it's a little I think counterintuitive at first perhaps because the layer that's doing the clipping has to be underneath the layer that's being clipped in other words I want the medal photo to show and outside the word medal so I have to actually reposition the layers and the only part that throws people off is at first you can't see the type anymore because underneath ok, so for this clipping group thing toe work you have to think a little differently and say the shape that's going to be doing the masking has to be underneath whatever's above it is what's going to be clipped and to create the clipping, masking and typical photoshopped fashion khun do it in multiple different ways under layer menu you could choose, create clipping mask or use a shortcut option command ji or all command ji or and I'll just show you when you do that here's what happens if you look at the layers panel? You'll see that the a top layer is kind of indented and has that little tiny arrow down below and this layer the name of it is underlined when you see that combination that's referred to as like the clipping group, the layer below is doing the clipping and the layer above is being clipped or is the clip e that's that that's not a term that photo shop actually uses thanks so that visually tells me what's happening here is this photo is on ly being visible wherever this type exists so as an example here's part of the reason why this becomes beneficial to me in that previous example, I'd go through all those steps to create a selection that looked like text, but I couldn't edit it anymore. This is still text, so I can go in and select the whole thing and say, I need to pick a different typeface and itjust updates so let's make it small enough that we can see the whole thing because it's a different type of typeface we can see there now I can still move the photograph around inside of it, but at any given time this is still editable, so it eliminates the worry of making a selection for my type or once again, people say, I guess I'll have to restaurant certain point. No, you don't because it's not any of the only things having influence is when you look at this layer where doe I see pixel information, even though it's type in this case ultimately is treated as if it's just a bunch of pixels and that's the shape that's creating this clipping mask okay, so where you can start to play with this is now so just at the surface level, I don't really like that typeface let me just pick a different one that's not one that I like a little better that will do there we go a little bigger, perhaps ok, so I have my type player can either move the type player up and down or the photo layer doesn't really matter because they're still separate layers and I could do whatever I want but where the fun begins is that because this is still a type player, you could do a lot of things to a type player to make it more interesting let's, hide the photo for a moment just talk about this for example, we have all these layers styles that we've been popping in and out of like drop shadow so let's just add a little drop shadow too. It makes it more interesting, but then we think, oh, what about maybe devilment boss, that might be kind of cool for a metallic look so it's a little hard to see right now because it's black but you can sort of see what's happening is starting to add like a little edge to my type. So all of these things are just typical things we can do to a type player or any layer for that matter that has information on it. But the added bonus here is if I now show this again, now we have the photo inside that also is being affected by that devil in them, boss and everything else. So this is the basic principle of clipping group is it's a clipping mask, I should say is it's based entirely on the position of the two layers and the layer on top is being clipped by the layer below. Now, as we'll see as we progress along where it gets really interesting is I could also say the layers above are being clipped so doesn't have to be one layer give the multiple layers clipped inside whatever's doing the clipping and that's where the fun really starts. So that's the basic concept and it's it's an alternative for situations where you think I really want to to do a form of masking, but a traditional layer mask won't cut it because as we've seen a number of times as good as later mass are at a certain point it still comes down to, well, it's paint and I can't edit paint the same way I can add a type and it's not just type it could be anything for that matter. So let me just show you a different example, and by the way, as I mentioned, there are multiple ways to create a clipping mask clipping mask just for those curious have been around for a long time and photo shop, but for whatever reason, for the longest time there was never a command under here that was called create clipping mask you had to know the secret handshake and the secret handshake was over in the layers panel position your cursor between the two layers and option are all click and that was how you would turn on or off at clipping mass so I've had people that I show clipping mask and they assume it's brand new it's been around probably photo shopped for nazi s for but for but it was kind of hidden because if you didn't know that trick or you would happen by accident or what just happened here so where it gets again very interesting as we can keep building on this concept and go back to our custom shaped tool make sure except to shape so I'm gonna create a shape player and let's just see, I don't know we'll pick something pretty basic for now that and, uh okay that's interesting. All right, sorry something went amiss there with my I'm not sure what happened there, but we'll continue along as if nothing actually happened. Okay, here we go. All right, so now I've just made a big shape of a narrow and the same thing applies I can say I really want the metal inside that shape so now it's clipped inside. I could add the layer style to that, but the advantage here and this builds on we were talking about before why vectors are useful over shapes is because this is a vector shape player it means I could decide, for example, that I want this to be longer and more pointy so I can do that and it will just reveal mohr of the layer above so whenever you're looking this you have to constantly looking at kind of the structure and say the layer that's the clipping layer the shape that's on that it's what's causing this to happen so if I alter the shape meaning ended the shape add more to it change the font it's going toe show or hide mohr of the layer or layers above things that makes them so far ok, so let's go back to this one for a second because again like said where it gets really interesting if you start building on this concept to say ok, I want to do add a little more to this so up here I'm going toe make sure I'm clicking above the clipping mask and this is a a theme that I probably haven't said as much as I should have been working with layers I'm constantly looking at my layers panel and thinking before I do anything am I in the right place and if I was down here and I added a layer it would act a little differently than if I was up here I want to right now add another layer into this clipping thing and if I put it somewhere else it wouldn't happen automatically because I can do this now let's just add a layer above and make an oval which will just fill with some color just to show you an idea here of something in this case, I'm deliberately not making a shape player because it's not really necessary for what I want to show and at first it's just an independent layer you can tell by both looking at the image itself, it's not only within the letters and over here in the layers panel you can tell it's separate because again, this metal photo is indented and the circle is not. So I want to add this into this equation and make sure I have this also clipped, so I just do the same thing. I just do that little shortcut option or all click and now it's inside there could change the blend mode, something like overlay. And now I have something that I can move around a position, do whatever I want, you know, for some effect, a lot of people use photo shopped for doing basic video editing because you can do that. This would be a perfect zap where you could make a relief. This was your logo. You could make a very basic video that animation that had of the spotlight effect going across her, whatever you want and all these things are possible because even though it looks like I've done something fairly permanent by making looked like the metal photo is now made up of type. It really is just clipped inside. So rely on the layers panel to remind you I can still see the entire photo. If I had something on alternative, I suppose, would have been to make a selection based on the type in versus election hit delete. Get rid of all that pixel information. That would be really bad, because now, there's, nothing else there. I would much prefer to have this entire photograph to pick a spot to go. What part do I like? The look of maybe right there looks kind of cool and stick with that and then move on and do something else. I may end up with three or four layers stacked inside this clipping one as long as you see them all indented like this, that means they will all be affected by the content of this layer below. Not whether it's, black, white or gray, but the shape of it and that's. What makes the difference? Um so what was that again? That I'm combined the circle with the photo? Was that a command? It's? Well again, is it really what it comes down to is however you feel most comfortable creating clipping mass, you can either go back here and choose create clipping mask or use the keyboard shortcut I because I spend so much of my time in the layers panel, I have an old habit of just option or clicking right there and see how the little symbol kind of shows it's going to create an early versions of photo shop. It was a really weird symbol was like a a circle with a line through it, or so he didn't really tell you what was happening. At least this kind of gives you a bit more of an idea because it mirrors the little arrow symbol so each time I would add another layer and well, later on, we'll see how you could put, like a photo inside each letter effectively to get kind of the effect you want. So that's kind of the basic principle of clipping mask and when often in projects, you have to look at something and say, which makes more sense, would it make better sense to make a layer mask in their traditional way? And in some case didn't have a choice, like an adjustment layer. Generally, it has a lair mask you paint on the mask when you're talking about masking a layer, then there's a lot of option going on, I find, and this is funny because clipping that's been around for a long time but it kind of went through a phase where I kind of forgot about them and did everything with layer mass and then found a couple times I'm working much too hard here I just made a type player and put underneath in clip did that would be much easier so here's another example of where this might happen? I'll show you an example in a minute another section next about probably an even better choice but this was probably for many people this would be the introduction to why clipping mass were useful and again I'll show when you talk about smart office how another option is now available but this for many people was sort of the entry level is too why a clipping mask made sense I've got this type player and I want to add some texture to it so there's a filter that's nicely enough in here somewhere where did they put it that oh it's one of these filter gallery things I think uh what doesn't matter because as soon as I go to run this filter I get this dialogue box that says this type lair must be rast arised before proceeding it's tax will no longer be editable rast arise the type and what's really scary it's actually prompting me to click ok instead of having a no thank you I'd much rather use a more nondestructive method button that's what it should say so this is a scary thing because if I click ok it looks the same visually I could run my texture but when I click ok I can't edit anymore so that that was always a problem. What people would do is they would duplicate the type player and rast arise one copy which was better than nothing but it's still ultimately meant kind of stepping backwards if you change your mind so instead what became clear was a better option would be to add a blank layer on top, fill it with exactly the same color and then on that one do whatever texturizing you're doing stick with that because it's there and then create that clipping mass so the net result is it looks like I have now added texture to my type but I've preserved the ability to edit the type and that up until the introduction of smart object smart filters was the solution and I wanted to show you that I would tend to now use filters instead. But even this it's nice to know that option exists for certain situations still makes life a little simpler okay, so the for the next couple examples I'll show you it's always the same principle and that is it's whatever's underneath it's the shape of it that's making this happen so how could we start to turn that into something more interesting? We'll let's take this one and I'd like to make kind of interesting border effect now in the past I might have for example, added layer mask and I think I showed this briefly yesterday you know, start painting on the mask and try and create a border but the one drawback to layer mask is that a certain point you're kind of stuck with a well, I've painted that and that's the best I can do so I could I could take my paintbrush and look at my brush edges and find some of the more unusual brushes that air on here and start tio paint on here and, you know, hide areas to make a interesting border but because at a certain point I'm kind of that's it I can't really change a whole lot about that and that's okay, but perhaps ah better method for this let's just get rid of this layer mask would be instead to you add a new layer and on this layer create some shape and I'm just going to make some weird shape under point on the shift key so I can combine kind of a circle and the square and I'm deliberately just randomly picking I don't have any plan in mind here and I'll fill that with some colored happened to be yellow, which is bizarre but doesn't matter because again it's not the color that makes a difference if I pull this down below and then clipped them together right away. I've got the start of something now I don't really love the way it looks, but at least now I can continue from there on this bottom layer, remembering that it's, the shape that's causing the clipping, aiken start doing things like applying filters to the shape because I'm not going to affect the photograph of I do a motion blur, it's going to take the edges of this shape and blur them, but knows how the photograph isn't blurry because what's happened is the shape underneath now has blurry edges to it. If I took a paintbrush and started painting in addition to this in some way, or maybe using a tool like the mixer brush, which I touched on briefly yesterday, how it will you do this kind of thing where you pick a weird kind of a brush edge. This is where the tablet really comes into play because you can actually tilt the tablet or the pen to change the angle, but all I'm really doing in each of these cases is adding something to the shape underneath, so that more of the photograph is revealed, so as a way to create unusual edges and things. This is an interesting option because we're not touching the photograph, we're not restricted to things we can do using. Just the brush and things like that and as we'll see as we progress along, I'll do the same thing but make this even smarter by using smart filters on this eventually so that I have clipping mass that's even smarter gives me more options than it becomes another kind of a reusable factor so clipping mass that's another option is just to say I want to do is make more interesting look to this photograph for example I wanted to you know, fit in with something that I'm doing a look that I've created this is just a layer and you couldn't duplicate layers from one image to another so if you want to use this because it's so beautiful if I want to use on two other photographs taken just duplicate that layer and make another clipping mask and go from there so it's it's another one of those reusable repurpose ing things that's very nice one we're start to talk about clipping mass another way I could use it that's actually just make a new document like to show different variations on a theme here so let's do this I'm just going to make this a smaller document for now but let's say I wantto be able to print eight by ten photographs and know when I do that that I'm gonna have a nice border around the outside and I'm ready to go so one way that I might do that and this is against the show different variations is just to say I'm going to say this is where ultimately I want my photo to go so I'm gonna again let's pick it a different colors was not faced with that ugly color all the time let's take a different color so I've got a little shape here and this is ultimately going to be the place for my photograph then I might take my type tool and add some text on the bottom not quite this size of course, and probably not quite so in your face typeface either let's pick something a little more pleasant uh something down here think spread out of it I can't type today actually most days alright and I've got kind of this little template in effect ready to print and I'm doing a very simple example with one photograph, but if you're doing like an album layout, you might have four little squares and one big rectangle each one of those is a separate layer so therefore you can make it the holder of a photograph so here's where you start to play with this idea, I'm going to add a stroke to this layer, which initially you might just kind of go ok, we're adding a stroke to ah blue layer of just kind of weird, but the whole idea of this is now when I'm ready to actually print something take this photograph make sure looks the way I want and then drag it in here, wait for it to finish and then do that clipping thing I could print it like that or because of the size I could look and say wow it's considerably larger than me scale it down to whatever size that I want now I'm ready to print when I want to print another photograph dragged that one in hide this one or deleted so once you establish this is the size you want, but see what's happened where it automatically because the clipping layer had a stroke that is always visible so don't have to always worry about adding another stroke on top every time I do it, I'm creating it so it's ready to go on all I'm doing is replacing the contents so I could do this you know, with anything I want I could take instead of having one layer like this, I could make a couple of them that and then make a third one, but I'm just, you know, making this up as I go, but whatever it is and it doesn't matter what aesthetically, you might prefer to have them all the same color, but ultimate doesn't really matter because what I'm doing is just these are all holding places and then it's a matter of just getting your photographs in here and I could I say let's pick these maybe and place it in the photo shop oh, come on you're not busy I know you're not all right we'll have to do with the old way drag it in position it and it just a matter of positioning on top of and then clipping so one of the many benefits of a clipping mass compared to a regular layer mask is I find this very useful to create kind of placeholder layoffs we don't have the photo yet, but you have an idea that on this album page I want three rectangles on the facing page I want whatever and you start building it without actual photos yet just by having layers that are filled with pixels doesn't matter what the color is if you choose to have, you know, drop shadows and uh strokes or whatever you do that and you can always add them after the fact but it means in this case it literally is drag it in their clip it and if necessary resize it a bit move on and talking to people who spend a lot of time creating layouts of multiple doctor multiple photos sometimes half the issue is there someone like they're distracted by the photos they're using because their pictures of whatever it is you know, the bride and groom or the parents or whatever and they're looking at the photograph instead of the layout this means just get a layout that looks the way you want based on blank squares or colored squares and then start replacing photos and later on so this can be used in lots of different ways and you can imagine how you could have a whole bunch of different template pages, so to speak and eventually it would look like this where and this is, by the way, one of the main reasons that I use um bridge I only do one but let's imagine moment that I could look through and see for five or six or ten of these little pages that each had different combinations off one big shape or six small ones or two big ones and two small in just picked the appropriate one and then bring in the photographs that you're working on, so just a nice way to start building things before even I mean, you could have this all set up and use reuse them over and over again to make sure you're hitting save as to save a copy that has your photos in and you're preserving this template we'll talk about templates again tomorrow and and it's it's not really a term that exists and photoshopped there's no commanded foolish up says say this template but this is like a template because the fact that it's a document full of placeholders means you can now use this for various purposes whether it's one photo for curt, creating a series of prints that all look the same to have to worry about resized to make sure the same size or layouts or whatever it is doesn't really matter. Every combination is goingto give you that this ability so the nice part of this is once you get comfortable with the basic principle which is just it's a shape and you clip something on top of it then it becomes targeting in your layers panel why got to make sure I dragged this layer right above here so that I can clip it to the layer immediately below and that's the key word has to be right above whatever layer you want to clip it with. Sometimes you can kind of run in situations where you drag a photo win and because of where your cursor happen to be in the layers panel it automatically gets added to a clipping mask before you're ready but you can also always sort of pull it up or down in the stack and get it in the right place. So it's like a lot of things to do with layers it's all based on a relies heavily on the layers panel where you have to look and say, am I in the right place? Where should I position this photo where this graphic element river might be so that it looks the way that I want okay? So as we go along we can start playing with this concept and trying although sorry let me do this first I want to assure you this um earlier we were talking about adjustment layers I kind of four shot a little bit to say. One of the areas where you could might need to do something differently is when you want to have adjustment layer act differently than it normally does. So, for example, in here, if I I am on this layer and right above it I choose to make a black and white adjustment layer by default adjust malaria's affect everything that's below it. Now we saw earlier I could put it inside a group to adjust everything within that group of what if I only want to adjust just that one layer just the layer that is above that's where clipping mask also comes into play and this one's a little bit different because if I look in the settings for my adjustment layer here's all the safer black and white see that little button right there that's a clip, which means if I click that it will only affect the one layer immediately below it. And if I look in the layers panel you can see if we look closely at it it's the same kind of principle there's thehe just layer and it has that little arrow to tell me this layer is being clipped to the one below it and if I were you can't see that layers panel isn't wide enough but if I show you could see the name is underlying so those are always the two giveaways that this is a clipping mask is thie clipper which is not its official name is underlined and the clip e is indented whenever you see that combination you know okay, so this is affecting just that one part so this is a nice solution for the fact that by nature adjustment layers want to select every single layer below but if you don't want that to happen you position it and then adjust and then do that clipping so as auda's it might seemed to say this it's not that unusual toe look in the layers panel and see a layer with an adjustment layer clip to it and a layer within just minor clipped it because you might want the each adjustment to effect in each individual layers this will probably not look beautiful from an aesthetic standpoint but just as an example to show you what I mean so I've added a black and white just there with a little tent on this photograph in on this one because I have no taste and I'm color blind apparently I want to do the same thing but a different type of tent whatever it might be and I want to make sure that that one is also clipped and eventually you start building up different combinations of ok that's really bad? Maybe I should just do different just minor, but you get the idea that this way I'm aligned myself to independently effect each one in a way that's giving me the ultimate inflexibility because I know if I need to I can either turn on or off or adjust thes adjustment layers that are affecting the layer below and not that I could see this happening all that often but it's nice to think that you have that option remember this photograph it's the size of this photo that's telling me you know where to adjust because that's all that's on here and that later, just my respecting one's below it, but it still has its own layer mask, so there's always that possibility of throwing the two together and say, well, I'm going toe clip it, but also need a mascot a bit because I don't this part of the photo, I don't really want that adjustment to be quite as in tense there for some reason to something listen look is good or whatever it might be, and we'll look at a another example that shortly where we come blind, combined, eh clipping, masking some layer mass along the way, but this is probably if I had to rank the most commonly asked questions this ranks right up there with a lot of photos of people is how do we get an adjustment layer toe on ly affect one layer not all layers and this is how I have to clip it with the layer immediately below so that means you just have to look at the again the structure of your layers panel and say we're going to put this adjustment there so on ly affect this one layer he wants to know can you clip to a group yes, I'm so glad you asked that let me clarify if you have a fairly recent version of photo shop you can clip to a group that happened probably photo shop cs six so yes indeed uh okay, so here's this one I had before and I'm going to put it in a group and then we'll go and find something more interesting uh come here as you can tell very often my examples don't make aesthetic sense but it shows how it works so I've just got now this weird metallic photo sitting immediately above the group and now I do that same clipping and now everything inside that group is being affected by the photo above it but again what's particularly nice about this is that I can still endit everything within the group whether it's type if I'm in this group and I decide once again that I need um I don't know let's just do something all the designs that they're going to talk to that please don't do that so bad but I'm gonna do it I'm gonna add a series of dots because I can yes perfect the best design ever in the history of design so now I've added all these things inside the group in that same theory of group applies whatever's in the group is affected by whatever you do whether it's a layer style or in this case a clipping mask so this the whole group is doing the clipping this's thie clip e and anything inside the group is affected by the group function so that was a long answer say yes you can but it's a really effective way and it's and it's actually quite exciting because I did there was a group years ago that I needed to do this they wanted to have editable type players like this inside design and have a texture on top we had to duplicate the texture eight times and clip it each type player x that's the only way to do it at that time was in yen at someone and said move the texture overbid it was like now I got eight layers of texture to move the same amount this is just so much nicer and as an added bonus which we will talk about shortly this because the way that I have my raw camera setting created even at this point of everything else I've added all the stuff and I decide I want to tweak the colors I can still jump back to camera and go in and change whatever it might be and you know whatever whatever I want and it will update and we clip if I that's not a real word the design so same theme as always this recurring ability to say how many levels of edit ability can I I have and my answers as many as you can because it's going to give you more options so I've done all this I might create a whole new design I think I wantto reuse this whole thing every single piece of this is available to me should I need to make any changes this is a shape player inside of here so I can edit that shape as we saw earlier with vector objects I still have the type and I even have all of these little circles which if I really wanted to save clutter I could take these and put them into a group inside the group that's being clipped I love this stuff so much fun all right so where we can start to really have fun with this is building on the same concept there's nothing new here that I'm going to show you accept just to expand your thinking that thing what else can I do with this so here's an example where that so far all I have is a big type player and I speak letters with a little drop shadow applied to it but I'm thinking would be much more interesting if each letter of this word had a photo inside of it because that would be more interesting to me than just looking at so all that means is I have to just go through and say ok let's figure this out that's and again I can I'll see if it'll let me place today of an offense actually worked okay so at first I'll just say bring it in full size because I'm not sure yet what I want to do with this so I hit enter and then create the clipping mask and right now by default it's showing in every single letter just because well that's the way I decided to do it so let's say that I want to use just know that part right there now at this point the clipping mask is working because the type layer is clipping it but I really on ly wanted inside the visible inside the letter h so how would I tell photo shop on ly show that part well this is we have to think ok just independent for a second if I just had a photograph and I only want to show one part of it how would I do that? I would use a layer mask right that's how you make only one part of a layer visible so ignoring the clipping mass for a second if I only wanted one part to be visible I would add a layer mask on top of that it happens to be, but I really only want to show inside the letter h I don't have to be really accurate about this I was going to go through with this polygon a lasso tool and say that should be good enough let's add a layer mask so I don't really care rather than make it specific to the just the letter age the letter h of the word is doing the clipping mask anyway so I'm just worry about that extraneous stuff on the rest I don't want and by doing that, that means I would have at least a little bit of an option to move or reese isis maybe a little bit if I wanted to and then it's just a matter of repeating that operation. What else do I want to hear? I want this one and I don't have a particular plan in mind for order, but let's just put in here and say, ok, that maybe around there and sometimes you don't really know until you clip it and then you can kind of look and see where does it might it make sense to go? Maybe something like that so then addle air mask just do it the other way just make a quick little selection around it and adam asked back to bridge now I'm doing it through bridge again it could be anyway did you get the images into photoshopped doesn't really matter. This is just easier for me because visually I can look and say which ones do I want? Um but that in there clipping mask and side in this case, I want time of the w at this point addle air mask now, as we're going along one of things that might be helpful because a certain points which, when I've been bringing a really big photograph, covers everything up. You might kind of think ok, where I lost track of where I'm at, where do I want a mask? Let me step backwards for a second one of the things that's really nice about layers that I haven't really talked about too much, but kind of fits in it's just another level of flexibility is opacity when you bring things in to photo shop, they come in a one hundred percent capacity by nature, so if I went to try and help with this clipping mass by creating a layer mask but I wasn't, I kind of lost track I got distracted and thought, wait a minute, what letter was I gonna use again? I forgot where I'm at looking here doesn't really show makes under seeing photos so what I could do is temporarily take this layer right but the wrong one take this layer lower the opacity oh yeah okay so I met w so now I can go in through this very basic mask effect and then put the opacity back up again so one of the things I think is really important remembers that there's so many of these functions that by nature are available to us I watch people struggle there turning layers on off just to see where they're at where why not just lower the opacity a bit so you can see through everything in the animation will they called onion skinning where they kind of look at the layer below to see where they're at? You could do the same thing that's all very temporary so let's just since we're committed to this let's finish it off here and that is the last couple here I think this is going toe maybe look nice over here with that and then here now this one I may I probably would still mask it just to be safe but sometimes just the order in which you kind of clip in the photographs takes care of itself but I always liketo just to be sure and one more which is this one place and put us up and in many cases like this one I'm on lee really using a small portion of the photograph um so let's bring him and see you are we want tio put him maybe a little smaller and once again I want to do my little bit of masking because before I make much of a decision about size I might as well get it down to the point where it's really visible and then aiken better see now I could go back in the side okay now here's a just to quickly review the kind of thought process we need to go in I want to scale down the photo of him toe fit better inside this letter a but it right now if I went to do that but what happened is the mask would scale with it and at a certain point I would start to lose part of the photograph so in this case the purpose of the layer mass is to make sure it doesn't touch the other two letters on either side so would make better sense in this case to unlinked thumb so that it's just showing me the are keeping the mass word is and now as long as I'm clicked on the photo I can adjust the photo to the size that I want in the position without worrying about the layer mask now when you look at the finished layer matter layers panel at first that looks quite complicated but when you look at it really carefully it just makes good sense that we've got the word hawaii doubt the bottom that's what's doing the clipping, those all those layer masses just to make sure there's no excess, you know, falling onto the other letters at this point, I could if I felt the necessity do cem put in a group, there wouldn't really be any reason in this case, because I don't expect to do any more to this. When we talk shortly about smart objects, I might take advantage of that if I'm going to incorporate this, maybe I'm creating this word designed to use in some other document, then I might do an extra step, and I'm going to say this, so I'm able to do that in our next session, ok? So let's do that make sure that saved that ok did all right so that's kind of that where clipping mass that the concept of them is this ability to do it shaped based instead of shade of gray base. But it's not that uncommon at all to run to this kind of situation where you are combining both to get the same result that you want. And that's, really one of the message I want to get across is that all things we've been talking about so far, even though I've been doing them a piece at a time or by no means stand alone it's start with this and then add this and add this. And if you need to do that on top of it. And they all build on each other to give you to get to the effect that you want. Which is the look that you want with us. Much added ability is possible.