Tutorial Tuesday - Layer Masks!

So for today's tutorial tuesday lets talk about Layer Masks! 

Still a wee bit easy but it's some of the basics, and just as important and can be confusing to some! 

What is a layer mask in photoshop? A layer mask allows you to control a layer's level of transparency. That's it! 

Sounds simple right? Well it's a little more complicated than that. You might be thinking that you can just adjust the opacity of the actual layer - right?

Well, lets say you're trying to brighten your subjects face and just her face. So you do a quick curves adjustment and then lower the opacity. What does that do? It lowers the brightness over the entire image! So what do you do when you want to just brighten the face? 

You use a layer mask!

Here's an example - With this image I want to lighten her up but keep my background darker.

She is already pretty light, but for example purposes I am going to make a slight curves adjustment.

 But, you see that my background has also become brighter. This is where the layer mask comes in. You will see the white rectangle circled in red...this is your layer mask. 

Now all we have to do is paint on that layer mask to remove the bright background! By clicking on the layer mask to make sure it's selected we are going to select a soft round brush and then select black as our foreground and white as our background colors . So: 

1: Click layer mask - to make sure it's selected

2: Select a soft round brush

3: Select black as your foreground color

Tips: 1) Above your colors in the tools panel you will see a teeny tiny black and white color pallete, if you click that it will easily change your colors to black and white. 

2) By hitting the "X" key you can change between your foreground and background color - go ahead and play with it! :)

Now all that is left to do is paint!

 IMPORTANT! 

Always remember on a white layer mask BLACK -erases and WHITE - replaces!

 ( we'll get to black layer masks in a minute) 

Paint whatever you want to take away! Mess up? Switch back to white and replace it! Very easy, and the best thing is its non destructive and easily fixed! No more undo trails.

Tips: 1) You can change the size of your brush by pressing the [ and ] keys! [ makes it smaller and ] makes it larger. 

Now, how do you know you got it all? Easily! Press the "ALT" key and click on your layer mask. You will get something that looks like this. 

Yes, it looks crazy but there is a point to my madness I promise! Do you see the white corner in the top right, the white oval in the bottom right, and even by the shoulder on the right? That's where I missed painting. So, I can now take my brush and paint in where I missed! So now it should look like this: 

Now to get back to the original simply press the ALT key and click the mask again! 

And your done! :) 

Now we talked about a black mask briefly too. This is simply the layer mask inverted. This starts out with your adjustment completely hidden. To reveal the changes that you have made all you have to do is paint with White! But this time we want the lightening to show up, so instead of painting the background we are going to paint our subject - which is what we are changing. It's just the opposite! Easy right! 

 Paint over your subject and/or what you are wanting to adjust

 Check to see if you missed anything!

 Make any fixes and press ALT and click the layer mask to go back to the original. 

And you are all done! 

Layer Masks can be used for pretty much everything! Adjustments all have a layer mask!

See! 

Look at all those beautiful layer masks! 

Now, to add your own layer mask to something! Easy peasy! 

See that tiny little rectangle with the white circle in it? Click that and you have added your own layer mask! 

You can not add a layer mask to your background layer, well because I said so. It's your background layer - you don't wanna mess that up! So in this example I duplicated my background layer by pressing CTRL J and then added my layer mask. 

Now I can do whatever I want to a copy of my background and then remove changes I have made. Lets get a little ridiculous...say I want to color her hair blue (way ridiculous!) 

So I paint all over the image in blue, then click on my layer mask and with black as my foreground color I painted all the blue away except for on her hair! 

Sometimes if I am painting on a layer mask and it's only a small area I am making an adjustment to I will invert the mask to lessen the need for so much painting. To do this I simply click on the layer mask and hit CTRL I  and now your mask is inverted! 

The possibilities are endless! From painting hair blue, making it just a little more perfect, adding in fun things, to making composites - (that's another tutorial tuesday)

Have fun with it, play and remember - 

On a white layer mask:

1) Black - Erases

2) White- replaces

On A black layer mask:

1) Black - Erases

2) White - Shows what you've done/ your adjustments made

Play with the opacity of your brushes too, say you want just a little bit of brightness on her face but a lot on her arm adjust the opacity of your brush! 

Play, Play, Play! And you'll want to bookmark this for later tutorials! 

Any questions? Please do not hesitate to ask!