Layer Masks – Karen on Beans
Lesson 24 from: Photoshop for Beginners: Essential TrainingMark Wallace
Layer Masks – Karen on Beans
Lesson 24 from: Photoshop for Beginners: Essential TrainingMark Wallace
Lesson Info
24. Layer Masks – Karen on Beans
Lessons
Class Introduction
00:52 2Introducing Photoshop
02:37 3The Class Materials
01:36 4How To Open Files
01:42 5Using The Home Screen
02:35 6Exploring The Interface
03:30 7Getting Additional Help
01:36 8Understanding Workspaces
05:11Tools and The Options Bar
03:50 10Why You Should Use a Tablet
04:31 11Finding Hidden Tools
04:23 12How to See What You’re Working On
08:12 13Selecting Things
08:01 14More Selection Tools
12:25 15Testing the Magic Wand and Quick Selection Tools
07:25 16The History Palette – Undoing Things
05:24 17Resolution and Bit Depth
07:03 18Photoshop Preferences
01:31 19Menu and Item Shortcut Keys
02:39 20Non-Destructive Editing
02:57 21Working with Layers
12:19 22Groovy 3 Exercise
11:43 23Layer Effects and Styles
05:38 24Layer Masks – Karen on Beans
08:33 25Using Adjustment Layers
05:38 26Martian Karen
03:37 27Advanced Compositing Using Layers
08:43 28Non-Destructive Editing Techniques
05:22 29Understanding Smart Objects
07:28 30Smart Sharpen
06:42 31Understanding Histogram
06:24 32Adjusting Curves
03:48 33The Healing Brush Tools
10:26 34The Clone Stamp Tool
07:47 35The Burn and Dodge Tools
05:55 36Understanding RAW Files
01:44 37Adobe Camera Raw
04:18 38XMP Sidecar Files
02:14 39Camera Raw: Edit
12:24 40Camera Raw: Crop & Rotate
03:13 41Camera Raw: Spot Removal
04:56 42Camera Raw: Adjustment Brush
08:17 43Camera Raw: Graduated Filter
05:40 44Camera Raw: Radial Filter
05:11 45Camera Raw: Red-Eye Removal
02:04 46Camera Raw: Snapshots and Presets
09:39 47Neural Filters
10:09 48Portrait Retouching Session
36:53 49Scenic Retouching Session
11:25Lesson 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 Now. Almost every single session that you're ever going to do in Photoshop involves a layer mask of some sort well most of the time. And so we need to learn about this because it allows you to take your editing to a totally new level and it allows you to do things non destructively in new ways, you are going to love layer masks and so to do this, we're going to revisit what we did before Karen on beings, except for this time, we're gonna do carry on beans the right way. The nondestructive way we're gonna take a little bit slower and this time you're gonna know what you're doing because we've learned some of these principles in previous sessions. Okay, so to start, we need to open Karen and we need to open beans. And so if it doesn't show up here in your most recent items, that's okay, click file open, navigate to your Photoshop class materials. And then first let's go down and open Karen, you c...
an click open, that's gonna open Karen and then again file open and then we need to get beans dot C R W C R W is an extension that says this is a raw file. So when I click open, we're gonna get this new dialog box, don't freak out about this. This is the adobe camera, raw dialog box, we're gonna learn all about it in future lessons that's okay. Just click open. We don't need to know what it's doing right now. 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, it's 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 your 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 going to 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 these uh Karen image, drag this down so it's covering all of Karen and then we'll hit the checkmark there. So we accept that we just have to have these beans on top. Now we're gonna go over to our layers palette, drag the beans below Karen. Okay now here's where layer masks come in handy. So remember before we selected all the white here and we deleted it and then we can see the beans behind Karen but that is destructive, we can never get that white area back. We want to do a nondestructive 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 palette and all the way down at the bottom next to the effects. Is this little uh square with the hole in it. So remember I showed you at the beginning of this of all this layer stuff, a little piece of paper with a hole in it. This allows you to have layers with holes in them, that's what this is. It's a layer mask. So I'm going to click on that and kapow, we 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 that 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 want to work on the layer mask. Now let me show you how this works. I'm gonna grab my pen tool here and what I want to do is I'm just gonna zoom in a little bit. So I'm going to 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 in 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 to a foreground and background color. Remember their 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, you 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 up if I want to take that away, I changed 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 uh of a layer. And you can do that anywhere you want in a match. 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 gotta be in 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 denies and if I make a mistake, whoops, that's okay, I change. Remember over here my foreground color is black, my background color is white. If I hit x. Now I've got white, that's 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 a 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. And it's really a powerful thing to do when you're doing compositing. Also you're going to learn about layer masks in the future when we do some more advanced compositing where we select hair and things like that. You'll see that a mask is used to get rid of all of this white down here so we can see through her hair. But we're gonna let Photoshop do the hard work to figure out that stuff because it's really hard to do that with a pin or a mouse. Okay, now that we know about layer masks, but we also need to learn about our adjustment layers and so we're going to do that next.
Class Materials
Bonus Materials with Purchase
Ratings and Reviews
Katie
Mark did a great job at explaining things and going over them multiple times throughout the lessons. My only issue was that sometimes it went a little faster than I could keep up and I needed to rewind it a bit and start again. But from someone who has never worked in photoshop before I 100% recommend this class to anyone trying to learn.
Terri Schwartz
Student Work
Related Classes
Adobe Photoshop