Lessons

Lesson Info

Masking Smart Objects

Let's just open something that I will frequently capture which is in this case this is a polaroid transfer without a picture in it you know how you used to be able to do polaroids where you could actually transfer them to paper and I wanted to be ableto have a similar look but didn't want to actually printed on polarised and actually do the process s o what I did is I did a polaroid transfer onto this thing it's like a watercolor paper and captured it you'll get this image with the glass if you purchase it and I want to show you how to get my picture on to that and make it look not necessarily exactly like a polaroid transfer but make it look like an interesting image within this shape so I'm gonna get a picture to put on it and in fact this picture is probably a little bit on the small side but it's not gonna matter I'll drag her over because we're going to end up with a soft looking image due to this background so it's not gonna matter if I scale up I could just scale down the polaro...

id transfer instead to get it uh size but I'm gonna type command tea for transform and just scale us up so completely covers up the bowler a transfer if I only needed the picture the size of its original that I would scale down the polaroid transfer instead all right so I have this underneath I have this on top how the heck can I get this picture to only show up where that thing is there's a couple different ways you could do it the way that comes to mind at the moment is to use a layer mask now with layer mass so far we've only talked about painting on them we've talked about making selections and filling with black things like that but I don't believe that we've pasted an image into a layer mask yet so first I'm going to go to the layer that's underneath I'm going to select all and then I'm going to copy then I'm going to go to the layer that's on top turn on its eyeball and I don't need the selection anymore so I was just using it to copy so I can de select and I'm going to create ah layer mask so click on the layer mask icon and now I'm going to choose paste and I would hope that the image would go into what's active what's active is this layer mask that's what my brain would be thinking but thanks see at least one person has tried it before if you choose paste it doesn't go into what's active which would be the layer mask whenever you choose paste you get a new layer I don't want that so I'll choose on do we have to somehow figure out how we can pay something into a layer mask because just making it active is not enough in order paste into a layer mask the layer mask must be visible filling your screen there are two ways to make the layer mask visible one is toehold on the option key and click on it we've done that before to inspect to mask were painted on it where we're looking at it as a black and white entity the second method would be to press the back slash key you know if you remember that or not but backslash key shows your mask is an overlay a red overlay in this particular case if I already hit the back slash key I wouldn't notice that I've done anything because there's nothing in that mask that's black yet and it's the black parts that show up is the overlay so either method I could use I'm going option clique in the mask because it's visually obvious that I'd done it and now I'll go to the edit menu and I will choose paste and when I do watch what happens in my layers panel you see the little uh think you see where it showed up right there in the mask once I'm done with that there's a little selection that's active here I don't need it so d select and now we're going to use that to determine where picture shows up the problem is when you use a mass ask black areas hide things in white areas caused things to show up so with this I'm going to end up adjusting it to get the areas that are dark to turn black and get the areas that are bright to turn white but that would give us the exact opposite of what we want if black hides things it would hide this area so I'm going to go to the image menu I'm going to choose adjustments and I'm going to choose invert that's going to turn this into a negative of itself just so you know there's two commands that sound really similar this one called invert means make my image a negative of itself is if you went in a dark room he had a negative uh the other one that sounds similar is under the select menu and it's called inverse but just so you know if you ever hear them in verse means give me the opposite of this selection feel little marching ants on your screen but just so you don't confuse the two this one has only to do with a selection where is the one I'm using right now is not that one this one here all right that just gave me a negative of this so things that used to be brighter now dark things that used to be darker now bright and I simply need to adjust it to make it so this is primarily white and black I want to do this though while I'm viewing my image so I can see what it looks like so I'm going to stop viewing this mask I'm going to do that by option clicking on the mask in my layers panel now we already have it partially showing up in there but I can see still the edge of the picture here and that's because the mask it's not really black out here so it's not completely hiding when it comes out to here so in order to change that I'm going to choose image adjustments levels now the moment we're going to be adjusting the mask not the picture but the mass because that's what's currently active and we need to choose levels from here we can't use an adjustment layer an adjustment layer would only affect the layers that are underneath the actual picture but when I go here and the mask is active, this will only affect the mask all right now I'm gonna pull in one side that forces areas to black and so if I pull it in far enough I hope that eventually my picture on ly show up within that shape but then the pictures not showing up all that much sure I got it to disappear out here but I don't see enough of it in here looks kind of cool though that it looks like something really old and faded away but the reason why it's looking the way it is if you look at our mask we got this outer edge to be black which means that it hid the picture outside of that shape but look at the inner part if white makes things show up the inner part needs to become white and right now it's really dark when levels the upper right slider forces areas toe white so if I pull that in should control where the pictures showing up and be able to get more and more of it showing up now I don't have to get it to be perfect I only mainly need to get it to disappear out here because I can always paint on the mask if I want to bring areas back is paint with white and the picture will come right back where I paint so I'm primarily looking around the edges to make sure that wherever the image starts disappearing that that edge looks okay and they don't mess it up if I bring this into far I might get that edge to be a little bit too crisp although I think I'm gonna do okay here you know bringing about that far click okay and if I don't like this part here is somewhat worn away I can grab my brush and if I paint with white white means make this layer show up and I could paint here to get her to show up or I'll choose undo because maybe I want it to look like it not all of it transferred but if the picture looks too perfect for this kind of effect so I want to do something to make it really feel like it's integrated into what's underneath let's be reminded of what's underneath I'll turn off the eyeball that's what's underneath I want some of that texture to come through and some of the color as well is what's under there so let's figure out how to do it well in my layers panel appears poppet minions call the blending mod menu and it determines how the layer I'm currently working on interacts with what's under it and I can change that we had choices like lighten and darken I'm not sure what choice I'd like to use each image might need a different setting to make it look interesting here's how you can cycle through that menu in try every single one of the choices very quickly in order to do this you need to be in the move tool if you're not in the move tool right now I'm in the paintbrush then the technique I'm about to show you would instead change the blending mod menu for that tool because it allowed your tools also have ah bloody mode in order to get it to work on a layer over there I need to work on a tool that doesn't have a bloody mod menu and just the easiest one to think of is the move tool at the top of my screen going across here there is no bloody mode related to that tool and therefore it says, well, you're asking me to change a bloody modi my eyes will change the one on this layer all right, let's see here's what you do know you're in the move tool hold down the shift key and your keyboard and then press the plus or the minus key on your keyboard either one one will go one direction in that menu the other would go the opposite direction either down or up within the blending bowed menu. So right now I'm holding down the shift key and I'm going to hit the plus sign uh I'm gonna hit it again and again in whatever I see something I like ah glance over the layers panel and I'll try to remember what the bloody mode waas so if I like this one I remember multiply mode, but I'll go through here, you know also keep in mind that if anything's too strong, how could always lower the opacity of this layer toa less and how much it shows up, so if I get something real close uh then I could do that that one looks kind of cool that's overlay that does too soft light hard let's, not too bad, but it's still too blatant for me. So overlay or soft light, I think keep going eventually I'll make it all the way to the bottom kind of black and white it okay? I liked overland soft light. I'm not sure which one do you guys like? But that's what I like. So I'm just going to go for overlay. I'm going to compare it to soft light. I wanted a real faded look that would be good, otherwise overlay and if overlays just a bit too much because the image was too vivid and things I can always click on opacity here, and usually I click on capacity. I dragged all the way to zero, so I see with none and I slowly bring it up to say how much of that do I want in there? And I could come up and maybe we're about like that. I kind of like it, and if you don't like that right here, it's kind of disappearing it's going to broken up, then what you can do is grab your paintbrush tool. And as long as the mask is active, it's the mask that's hiding those areas if I were the option clique in the mass so you can see it. You see that there's some stuff in here that's causing it to disappear looks like if the image where to extend all the way out here, there's also places it would show up there. Well, I could just grab my paintbrush tool right now and paint with black and you say, I don't want any of this stuff showing up, do you remember that if you hold the shift key when you're painting and you click into spots, it will connect the dots with a straight line? That's what I used to paint across there very quickly? Uh, I'm going to paint on this area though, with white, and I'm going to do it when I'm looking at the picture, so option, click on the mask and I might get a soft brush and I could just paint right here to bring the image in, and if I wanted only partially bring it in, I would lower the opacity, my brush, maybe I bring my brush down to forty percent and say bring back forty percent of the image in there and I could paint over it multiple times to build it up where I really wanted to see it, but that's looking pretty cool is not I think it is, I don't know about you guys, but what I like about it is that I can now do this and if it wan't any other picture to be put in their, uh, I could drag a different picture over here in all I got to do is drag that mask to its layer and it would automatically be masked in this way uh and so could be rather nice. Uh, I just have to remember to send it to overlay mode so let's see if we get a different picture in there it tells me my clip words too big, I don't care. All it means is I copied something a tte, some point in photo shop and when I switched out of photoshopped, it thinks I want to use whatever I copied in another program, so it said, sorry can't do that, all right? Let's, just grab an image open up, I'll use the move tool and I don't know which one of these two files it iss this one put it over here, I'll place it so it covers up that and then all I'm going to do is in my layers panel, I'm gonna click on the mask and if I drag it up to the layer that's above, its going to remove it from the layer is currently on, but I mentioned a little bit about the logic behind the keyboard shortcuts, and part of it was that he held on the option key oftentimes you work on a copy, so I'm going to go to that mask a hold on the option key, and I'll drag it up to the layer above and now it's only showing up in that area I'll hide the later I was working on, so it doesn't get in the way and on that layer above all set itto overlay mode because that seemed to be the motor like and now it's on there, and if I wanted to, I could lower the opacity of it to make it feel that way, the images just a little bit too big, and this is where you got to be careful because if you remember there's a link symbol in between this mask in the image and that means if I scaler rotate this, this should scale rotate as well in the time when you don't want to do that is when this mask lines up with something that's underneath in this case that's the case let's, look at what would happen if I type command tea for transform and I started to scale us down you see that the mask also get scaled, so he's escaped aboard that and I'll just click on that little link symbol in my layers panel right there so that now if I transform this that's not going to transform along with it so little command tea and see if I can get this scale down enough where I can see most of the sign uh I don't want to distort it so we'll just have to kind of keep it within the range of what's their pressure turner and threw him down so I think that's that's pretty cool looks interesting I like to better on the first one because that's where I really find tune the settings that I had I might want to go through with this other one in experiment with different blending modes again remember that's the move tool you hold shift and a plus sign and that maybe I like it better right there but I could cycle through them all to see he is there one for this particular image that makes it look better maybe that which is dark and mode or there was some other one I liked that darker colors kind of cool any of those so like I say, if you purchase a glass, you'll get these images and so then you don't have to do your own polaroid transfer to get this, but if you don't get the class, just start looking for things that are similar to this where you have a white background and something transferred this could be a rubber stamp if you are somebody that uses rubber stamps try to get a rubber stamp it doesn't have anything carved out of it yet like a little what you call it linoleum block in print with it, it'll print unevenly. Then you want to get your photo to show up within that shape. You used the exact same technique so it's not just for this particular image it's, a similar situation. Other thing I could do if I wanted to refine this is if I don't like being able to see out here the texture, then you could come in in adjust that just go to levels in levels. Thie, upper right slider forces things toe white. I could bring it in until most of that disappears. Then the middle slider controls what's left over, and you could try to darken it back down. But you'll most likely need to, uh, paint on the edge up here where I couldn't get it, and then you'll want to use different bloody modes or opacity. Now that what's underneath is a different brightness where you could just use, uh, paintbrush or a mask.