The Art of Masking
A wise man once said, “Nothing worth doing in life should be done without layer masks”. Apparently, the wise man was a big Photoshop user who may have spent a little too much time alone on top of the mountain. But enough about him. Layer masks are right up there at the top of the list of things you really need to know about when working in Photoshop because without them, your work, your creativity and your flexibility all suffer. It’s that simple. It’s a good thing for us, then, that layer masks are so incredibly simple and easy to understand!
Masks in image editing software are a way of protecting specific areas of your image, just as you would use masking tape when painting your house. A mask consists of a grayscale channel, called an alpha channel and is often displayed as a ruby overlay so the underlying image can be seen through the mask. The darkest areas of a mask are the areas most protected and the white areas are unprotected. Shades of gray represent areas of partial protection that corresponds with the level of gray.Masks are employed in various ways depending on the software program, but the basic concept is the same. Whether it is Clipping Masks in Photo-Paint, Quick Mask Mode and Layer Masks in Photoshop, Mask Mode in PhotoImpact... they all employ the basic concept of grayscale masks to perform image editing functions to selective areas of an image. Often masking is used to apply varying levels of transparency to a layer or image.
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