Using Masks in Photoshop

Video Transcript

My name is Dan Kallenberger. I am an instructor at a technical college teaching Visual Communications and Photoshop as well as other Adobe products. I am going to be showing you Photoshop CS2 today. Alright what I’m going to do now is use the mask tool, with the mask tool what does allows you to do is you’re able to cutout imagery from the background. So what I’d like to do is take the background image automatically when you crop a photograph it’s a background and you can duplicate that by putting it on it’s own layer by dragging the background to the new layer tool. I’ll delete the background by dragging the background to the trash can. The mask tool looks like this down here in the bottom corner. It’s a box with a circle in it, we click that and we get automatically a mask tool. I’m going to fill that with black, because what that’s going to do it’s going to allow me to hide my image and then I can actually do a circle and I can fill with a white and you’ll see what happens. I’m going to make a couple of adjustments here, but what masking allows you do is if you unlock this with the chain tool you can actually move around this mask and you’ll see that I get some extra pieces at the bottom but I can erase those later. The masking tool is very powerful because it actually can disable it and keep your original image. You don’t have to apply it and that’s what makes Photoshop really powerful with masking. That is just one to do it; there are many others you can use this in combination with layers if you’d like and you can also use a brush with this. The brush is pretty powerful as well, so what you can do is you’re going to actually paint and make soft edges with a paintbrush if you’re actually painting with it, that is the mask tool.

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