Layer Masks in Photoshop

hello it's Gary Simon here with the design letter and design course.com and today we're going to take a look at layer masks and what they are so let's just go to file new with 800 I'm going to choose height 500 resolution 72 pixels per inch hit okay going to zoom up to 100% real quick up here and all right so I'm going to create just a real basic cool looking type of image here uh real quickly uh and we're going to use it uh with layer mask or create it with layer mask so with this tool selected right here which is the custom shape tool just left click and drag out to get it we're going to choose up here a heart and these are predefined shapes all right I'm just going to choose red for the foreground color hit okay and then hold shift and drag out to a heart around that size and then with the move tool just move it over here to the left just a little bit okay so the idea I had is instead of just being uh This Heart being a solid color say for example if I wanted to put an image inside of here well we would do that with a a layer mask so first we need an image and the image right here I just want to Google images and just type. Paradise HDR and the second image and this may it may be different results for you based on whenever you did this um is this image right here really you can use any image you want uh if I right click click copy image uh and I'm using Google Chrome by the way for the browser um I could come in here and create a new layer and then right here is where we we create a clipping mask this checkbox hit okay now you can see this layer has a little arrow that's pointing down towards the base layer which is the heart uh now I can go ahead and hit contrl V to paste that image now because the image really big I'm going to hit contrl T to and then hold shift to scale it down so so I'm just going to bring it over here scale it down a little bit more maybe even more all right select the move tool and hit apply okay so really this looks uh pretty cool and and of itself um if we look over here in the layer we actually see the full image uh but because it is using this base layer as a mask we only see this heart shape and that is the Bas of basis of what a layer mask is um let's go ahead and add another layer here on top of this mask because we can add an infinite number of layers here uh so if we go to a new layer check that again hit okay we can see we have another one on top of it so if we use the type tool and type say for example love first we're going to choose a white color for our foreground just click in there and Type L oov we don't want we don't want the E yet now I'm using uh aerial black now I want to use uh the move tool hit control t hold shift and we're going to scale this thing up a lot right around there select the move tool hit apply all right now let's create let's right click duplicate layer hit okay and now we want to just put an e over here now if I drag this down there we go it's no longer a part of a mask here so if I also move it over here change the colors choose the type tool change the color to let's say this blue and then just put e oops well there we go um we kind of have like just a cool design say for example we wanted to continue this image right here well we can make it a mask as well so let's create a new layer select this button here to create another uh layer mask here and then hit crl V again and then crl T to scale it down cuz it's really big still that's that one right there so all right select the move tool and there we go uh looks pretty cool if you ask me uh and that's just uh the very premise of how you can add uh layers uh masks now we don't always have to just it's not limited to photographs uh or text we can just add anything we want uh and play around so let's create a new layer hit okay okay so it's just uh above this uh Paradise image just below the Lov now uh let's add a gradient for example so let's make sure up here this second one for ground to transparent is selected and let's change the background color uh let's choose this blue sky right here and then make it a little bit darker hit okay and then take our gradient and there we go as you can see it still stays within uh anything we do obviously will stay within the shape as long as it is a mask and we can do any number of things obviously I we could change the uh blend mode of the layer experiment and see how that I'm just using my down arrow by the way how it affects it and there we go we created pretty cool looking design very simply and very quickly with the use of layer masks there's obviously an infinite number of possibilities that you can use layer masks for um and really it's just knowing when to use them it's just a matter of practice and experience all right check out designcourse decom if you haven't and I will talk to you later all right goodbye [Music]