In this installment of I’m Learning Photoshop, I took on the Working with Masks and Layers chapter from PS CS4 Classroom in a Book. Ok, masks are not easy. This lesson took me two hours. Masks are like taping off things you want to retain like taping off the trim when you paint a room. There’s lots of different ways to mask, most of them nerve-wracking. The quick mask is easiest but it doesn’t stay once you deselect it. I did really like the clipping mask. You can put a texture layer over some text or a layer with a selection in it then apply a clipping mask to make the text or selection fill with the texture. And if you really care, masks are stored in channels with the rest of our saved selection information because they are just color information as opposed to being an image/object. These channels do not show in our images unless we show them purposely. Masks in channels are edited by painting in black to add to it, white to reveal what is beneath and shades of gray to partially reveal. There. I just answered all the review questions in one paragraph.
Here’s the results of my lesson: