Layer Masks in Photoshop

June 07, 2021

Layer Masks in Photoshop

Welcome to the very first vlog from Photoshop Simplified. All the boring stuff about me can be found in the about section. So without wasting much time let's quickly jump to today's topic i.e. Photoshop Basics.

As this is the first vlog we'll be starting with very basic stuff related to Photoshop.

So to begin with, we head over to Layer Masks. Layer masks are one of the most important building blocks of Photoshop, be it compositing or retouching.

So, what is a layer mask?

A "Layer Mask" is a way to delete or, technically speaking, a way to hide unwanted pixels so they can be recovered later. The basic principle of a Layer Mask is,

"BLACK PAINTED OVER ANY AREA IN THE LAYER MASK WILL GET HIDDEN AND WHITE PAINTED OVER ANY AREA IN THE MASK WILL GET SHOWN.

Shortly, "WHITE REVEALS AND BLACK CONCEALS"

Note: Any other color will be changed to their grey/luminosity values.

Pretty confusing, right? Let's understand with an example below.

Here you can see a simple text layer with the letter A.

Now if I want to hide the right side of "A" without actually deleting the pixel information, I'll use a tool called layer mask.

First of all, I will select the part, I want to delete, with the Rectangular Marquee Tool(Shortcut Key M).

Now, I'll click on the layer mask found below the "Layers Panel", as a white rectangle with a black/grey cutout.

This will generate the opposite mask of what I want. So now I'll Select the mask and dial in the shortcut "Ctrl/Cmd+I", which is the shortcut for Invert Colors.*

The result obtained will be as such.

(Left of A will be hidden because the area is filled with black as seen in the layers panel)

Now if you want to recover some parts of it, you will have to simply paint over the area with a brush and Foreground Color selected as white.

As you can see, some of the areas were recovered by painting white on the layer mask.

So, What's the benefit of using Layer Mask instead of the Eraser Tool.

From the above explanation, it has been been very self-explanatory that layer masks are completely nondestructive. It means, that the deleted pixels are there, they are just not visible.

A very practical example will be, that you are working on a composite and you are done for the day so you decide to continue the work the following day. So, you simply save the file and close it. When you return to the file the very next day, you find that a part of an image was removed by mistake. You decide to Undo it, which is practically impossible as History is deleted once you close your file. So now you have to again bring in the image and go through the tedious task of re-selecting the required parts.

All of these can be avoided if you use "Layer Masks". You just need to go to the desired layer and paint white on the area required, because "WHITE REVEALS AND BLACK CONCEALS"

Note: If you use any shade of grey other than black or white it will generate transparent results based on the luminosity values, i.e. more the black more transparent your object will be, and vice versa.

The transparent areas were painted with different shades of grey.

With these, we come to the end of today's blog. There are a lot of other aspects about Layer Masks but everything cannot be learned in a single blog.

Below you can find some useful shortcuts which can help you in masking.

Ctrl+I: Inverts the mask. Black areas become white and vice-versa.

*Alt/Option+Click on layer mask button: This shortcut creates an inverted mask for the selection. Normally, the area inside a selection is filled with white, and the rest with white. This shortcut just does the opposite. Its basically, "Creation of a mask"+"Ctrl+I"

Ctrl/Cmd+Backspace: It fills the selection with the background color. Mostly, black or white in this case.

Alt/Option+Backspace: It fills the selection with the foreground color. Mostly, black or white in this case.

Alt+Click on Layer Mask: It reveals the layer mask and you can visually see the Actual Layer Mask.