How to Use Layer Masks in Photoshop Elements 15
During this Photoshop Elements 15 tutorial video, we will talk about layer mask and how to work with it.
Hello again and welcome back to our course on PSE 15. In this section we’re going to take a look at Layer Masks.
Earlier on in the course I pointed out to you that one of the reasons that you need to develop your use of selection tools is to be able to work on part of an image. When you’re working with layers sometimes you need to work on part of a layer. And one way of doing this, a very effective way of doing this usually is to use Layer Masks. And the basic principle behind a layer mask is really in the name.
If you have a layer that performs a certain task, so for instance supposing it’s a layer that is applying an effect to an image or perhaps a color change. We stop the effect being applied in part of the image by masking the effect. In order to demonstrate this I’m going to apply an effect to this orchid but it’s only going to be applied to the flowers, the petals themselves. The background including the foliage will not be affected by this effect.
I have the background copy layer selected. What I’m going to do is apply an adjustment layer and I’m going to apply a filter. We haven’t really used filters so far. You don’t really need to know much about them at the moment because we’re going to spend a little bit of time on them in the not too distant future. But even if you’re not really familiar with photographic filters what I’m going to do is apply a warming filter to this image.
So the Warming Filter 85 here is the one that I’m going to apply. I have a slider here where I can adjust the density of the warming effect. So I’m going to slide it quite a long way over to the right. Probably grossly overdoing it so that you can very definitely see where the effect is and isn’t being applied.
So let’s push it a long way over to the right. You see the warming effect on the whole image? Maybe that’s just a bit too much. What about setting it there at 80%? Having applied that I’m now going to close the Filter dialog itself.
Note the layer in the Layers panel. There are actually two thumbnails. One thumbnail says Layer Thumbnail and the other one says Layer Mask Thumbnail. And it’s now the layer mask that I’m going to work on.
Now here’s a very important point. You notice that sort of double blue line around the layer mask. That means that the layer mask is selected and if I want to do some work on this layer at the moment the work would be on the layer mask. If I click back on the thumbnail for the layer itself this thumbnail indicates a filter then it would be the layer itself that I would be working on.
So if I right clicked now and said Edit Adjustment it would bring up the Photo Filter dialog again. Whereas if I make sure that the layer mask thumbnail has the double blue line around it whatever I do now is going to be applied to the layer mask.
Now the way that the layer mask works is this. I’m going to go back to the image itself bearing in mind that it’s the layer mask thumbnail that’s selected and what I need to do is to paint onto the image using black paint the areas that I don’t want the filter to affect.
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So I make sure I’ve got a paintbrush tool selected. And I make sure I’ve got black as my foreground color. You know how to set it if it isn’t. I’m going to use quite a big brush at the moment, 205 pixels. That’ll do. Black brush, 205 pixels. I’m going to start painting on the image. Now you may expect this to be black paint but you may be surprised because what happens in fact as I paint onto the image is that what I do is lose the warming effect.
And what I’m doing is painting black onto the mask. If you look up at the Layers panel now you can see where I’ve painted the black on. And that’s why it’s called a mask, because the filter is trying to shine through that rectangular panel but its effect is masked where there is black paint. And largely depending on the amount of time that you have available to mask this effect you can mask it as accurately as you want to.
So I spent a little bit more time there on the layer mask. If you look up at the Layers panel you can say that I’ve covered most of it now. And you can certainly see the effect of the layer mask on the warming of the image because it really is now confined to the petals.
A couple of other things to point out here. One of them is that you don’t have to use black. Black completely obscures the effect. But if you use a shade of gray you can partly obscure the effect. I’m not going to demonstrate that now but that’s a good one to experiment with.
The other point to bear in mind is that you don’t have to use a brush. If you’ve got some other way of making that part of the layer mask black then that will have the same effect. So filling a rectangle, for instance, would be an effective way of doing it. Another approach would be this.
What I’ve done here is to undo all of the black brushing that I did and the layer mask although it’s selected is now completely empty. What I’m going to do now is to select the flowers and petals. So I’m going to go to the selection tool and make a reasonably accurate selection on the flower.
Having made that selection what I’m now going to do is to invert the selection, then I’m going to use another one of the drawing tools, the Paint Bucket tool. And what the paint bucket tool does is to fill a selected part of your image with the foreground color. So all I need to do is to select the paint bucket tool, click on the current selection which is the area outside the flowers.
Look at what happens. Look at the layer mask and that’s obviously generally speaking going to be a much quicker way of creating a layer mask than all of that paintbrush work.
That’s it for this section. I’ll see you in the next one.
Simon Calder
Chris “Simon” Calder was working as a Project Manager in IT for one of Los Angeles’ most prestigious cultural institutions, LACMA.He taught himself to use Microsoft Project from a giant textbook and hated every moment of it. Online learning was in its infancy then, but he spotted an opportunity and made an online MS Project course - the rest, as they say, is history!
