If you have been following PSD Vault Photoshop tutorial for a while, you probably would have noticed a lot of them contain steps involving Photoshop Masks – which can be a little difficult to understand if you just started Photoshop.

In this second part, I will cover the following topics:

• The Use of Quick Mask
• The Use of Clipping Mask
• Apply Mask on Image Adjustment Layer

Also if you would like to read the first part of this series, please click this link below:

A Beginner’s Guide to Photoshop Masks – Part One

OK let’s get started!

The Use of Quick Mask

Firstly download this stock image and use it for this part of the tutorial.

Before we begin, I would like to mention a bit of introduction of “Quick Mask” – although it’s got the word “Mask” in it, it’s more widely used as a tool to make selection of certain objects on an image, rather than hide or reveal them.

Quick mask can be quite useful if want to cut out one part of the image that would be otherwise difficult to select using selection tools such as lasso or marquee tools.

Now let’s load the stock image you just downloaded into Photoshop.

To enter the Quick Mask Mode, Press the “Q” key or Press the button down the bottom of the toolbox:

Choose the black colour as the foreground colour:

Now you can also adjust the brush size prior to painting the mask:

Use this brush to paint over the eagle, as shown below: (for tutorial purpose, I did not go into making a precise selection here)

Now press “Q” key to exit quick mask mode, you will see the mask become a selection:

Once the selection is made, you can copy, cut and move it anywhere you want.

That’s pretty much it for Quick Mask. If you want to make a more precise selection, adjust the brush size and use erase tool along with the brush tool when you paint the mask.

The Use of Clipping Mask

Now let’s get to the clipping mask part. Personally I think this is one of the greatest feature of Photoshop and I seriously can not be without it :)

Basically a clipping mask can take the shape of the  base layer – the base layer can be text, shape, or a filled selection.

Let’s take a look at the clipping mask in action. Download this stock image and use it for this part of the tutorial.

Create a new document sized 600px * 600px with a white background and type some texts onto it:

Load the stock image in and select a portion of it, copy and paste onto the text document you just created:

Right-click on this layer and choose “Create Clipping Mask”:

Now you can the layer has a little down arrow attached to it, meaning it has been transformed into a clipping mask:

Now if you take a look at the canvas, you will see the texture layer takes on the shape of the text layer. As a result, we successfully apply the texture to the text and make it look more stylish :)

You can also use clipping mask on shapes, just using the same method as on a text layer. Have a try with it and experiment the effect yourself :)

Applying Mask on Image Adjustment Layer

On later versions of Photoshop, we’re introduced a new featured called “Adjustment Layer”, which you can apply image adjustment options such as curves, color balance and channel mixer, etc onto it – without the need of changing the original layer content.

Now on those adjustment layers, you can also apply mask in order to hide or reveal certain portion.

As shown below, I added a color balance adjustment layer to the background layer. By default, Photoshop will automatically attach a mask to the adjustment layer:

Same as the layer mask on a normal layer, you can use brush tool/eraser tool to paint or erase on the layer mask:

As the portion on the adjustment layer will be hidden, and reveal the content on the layer below:

One more thing you need to remember is that you can make the adjustment layer as clipping mask via right-clicking menu:

This way you can apply image adjustment only on the layer that it “clips” onto, without affect other layers. Also when you combine the layer mask on the adjustment layer, and the clipping mask option together, you can add very complex effect to the image :)

OK that’s it for this tutorial! Hopefully you learn a few things about the masks in Photoshop and find those tips useful :)

Till next time, have a great day!

I thought it might be the time that I write an article specifically explaining the relevant areas you know about layer mask, and how you can apply it in different occasions to suit your needs.

In Part One of this Beginner’s Guide to Photoshop Masks, I will show you some basic information about masks and simple way of adding, deleting and painting on layer mask.

A Brief Overview of Photoshop Mask

I’m sure everyone here knows what a Mask is and what it is used for in real life – it hides things so people can’t see what is behind the mask. Photoshop mask works exactly the same way.

In Photoshop, there are two types of Masks – Layer (Pixel) Mask and Vector Mask.

By definition (extracted from the Adobe Help Centre):

Layer Masks are resolution-dependent bitmap images that are edited with the painting or selection tools.

Vector masks are resolution independent and are created with a pen or shape tool.

Layer and vector masks are non-destructive, which means you can go back and re‑edit the masks later without losing the pixels they hide.

Where Can I Find the Masking Options?

In Photoshop, there are many ways of adding masks to layer. One Method is to go into Layer > Layer Mask from the top menu.

Once you expand the Layer Mask menu, you will see a list of options such as “Reveal All”, “Hide All” and so on. In this tutorial, we will start with the first two options.

Now Load any image into Photoshop, press Ctrl + J to duplicate the background layer then fill the background layer with black colour then click on the “Reveal All” option:

As you can see, there is now a white layer mask being linked to this layer, as shown below:

Now Right-click on the layer mask you just added, and choose “Delete Layer Mask”:

Go back to Layer > Layer Mask and choose “Hide All” option this time:

Now instead of a white mask, you will a black mask being attached to this layer, and in the mean time the image will become invisible on the canvas:

In practice, if you have only a small portion of the image you wish to the conceal, you can choose the “Reveal All” and use brush tool the paint on it to hide the portion.

Else, if you have a large portion of the image you wish to conceal, you can use the “Hide All” option, then use a brush tool to paint on it, in order to the reveal the portion you don’t wish to hide.

A quick note: you can also add a layer mask by clicking on the button shown below on the layer palette:

Additional Masking Options

Now you may wonder: is there any extra settings I can apply to a layer mask? The answer is yes :)

If you go into “Window > Masks” and click on it:

Once you enable this mask window, you will see extra options appearing and you can adjust the settings to specific layer mask you wish:

Have a try with those settings and see what result they bring you :)

Use Soft or Hard Brush Tool to Paint on Layer Mask

One quick way of hiding and revealing object is to use brush tool to paint on the mask. By adjusting the brush hardness, you will have totally different results. Therefore, depending on the effect you’re trying to achieve, adjust the hardness of your brush to before you start painting.

To start painting on the mask, hold down Alt + Left-click to switch to the mask, then grab the brush tool from the toolbox.

Here is an example of using a 0% hardness brush with a single-click on the centre: (a reveal-all mask)

On the layer palette:

On the canvas:

The outcome:

Here is an example of using a 100% hardness brush with a single-click on the centre: (a reveal-all mask)

On the layer palette:

On the Canvas:

The Outcome:

As you can see, by having a different set of brush hardness, the outcome is entirely different.

There is no restriction as to which brush you use on the mask, you’re free to experiment any brush you prefer and see what results they bring you.

OK that’s it for this part one of the beginners’ guide to masking in Photoshop. Hope you find these information useful :)

In Part Two, I will be talking about advance masking such as:

• Quick Mask
• Clipping Mask
• Mask on Image Adjustment Layers

Stay Tuned and have a great day!

In this tutorial, I will show you how you can Create this Awesome Abstract Photo Effect via Layer Masking and Custom Patterns. Some steps can be a little tricky, but why not have a try!

Along the way, I will show you some interesting method of making custom, abstract style patterns by mixing hard and soft round brush, plus some lighting techniques.

Here is a preview of the final effect we will be aiming to achieve: (click to enlarge)

PSD File Download

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You will need the following stock to complete this tutorial:

Model

Cloud Brush

Smoke Brush

Star Brush 1

Star Brush 2

OK let’s get started!

Step 1

Create a new document sized 800px * 1044px, fill the background layer with black colour. Create a new layer called “background light” and use the Cloud Brush and big soft white brush, create some random light as shown below:

Load the Model image into Photoshop, cut out the model and paste it onto our document. Don’t worry if edges appear to be a bit rough – this is not important for this tutorial as we will be masking them out later on.

We will be doing a bit of retouching for this model. If you look closely, you will see some black spots on the girl’s cheek. We will remove them by using the healing brush, as shown below:

This is the effect after applying the healing brush:

Grab the Sharpen Tool from the toolbox, set strength to around 20%, apply some sharp effect onto the girl:

Hair

Lips

Step 2

We can create some abstract pattern by mixing Soft and Hard Circle round brush. As you can see, below is a big soft white brush with 0% hardness (a single-click):

Now grab the eraser tool, set the brush hardness to 100% for the round brush, do a single-click to the position shown below:

Then use the free tranform tool to warp it, distort it, whatever you like:

You can create abstract shape like this, which you can then apply to the image:

Meanwhile, you can add some shining stripes by doing the followings:

Firstly use a soft white brush to do a single-click on the top edge:

Then compress it down using the free-transform tool:

Rotate it to an angle you prefer:

By repeating the steps shown above, we can create some cool abstract patten quickly and use the to spice up the effect:

and this is the overall effect so far: (you effect may look different, as the pattern you create may be different from mine)

Step 3

Now let’s add a layer mask on the model layer, use a combination of hard, soft and smoke brush sets on it. Use your own creativity on the mask, and see what result it brings you:

and here is my effect after messing up with my layer mask:

Add a Curves adjustment layer to the top of the model layer: (make sure to tick the “use previous layer as clipping mask” option when adding them)

As you can see, by adjusting the channels on the curves adjustment layer, we can add colours to the image:

I added another levels adjsutment layer as clipping mask to increase the contrast a bit:

Mask on the levels adjustment layer:

here is the effect so far:

Step 4

Now let’s play with the lighting effect for a while. Create a new layer on top of all previous layer called “highlights” and set the blending mode to “overlay”, use a soft white brush to do a single-click to the spot shown below:

Create another light layer on top and use a big soft white brush to do a single-click on the spot shown below:

Optional: duplicate this light layer once for brighter effect:

We can add some light strips to the image. Grab a big soft brush to do a single-click on a new layer:

Then narrow it down by using the free transform tool:

and add those lights on the position shown below:

Step 5

Now let’s use the star brushes we downloaded to paint some star to the image, make sure you use a mixture of big and small stars:

(you can either create a new layer on top of all previous layer to paint star, or you can create layer below the original model layer if you want to add stars behind the model)

Also make sure you use both white and black colour to paint the star.

Once you’re done with the painting, add the following two adjustment layers on top:

Color Balance

Layer Mask on Colour Balance adjustment layer:

Vibrance

Layer Mask on Vibrance adjustment layer:

and here is the effect you will have so far:

For some final lighting touch-ups, you can use the dodge tool (set strength to around 30%) to add some highlights to the girls hair and face, as shown below: (after you flatten the image)

and here is the final effect: (click to enlarge)

That’s it for this Photoshop tutorial! Hope you enjoy it and find it useful. Until next time, have a great day!

In this tutorial, I will show you a rather useful technique I use in Photoshop to make perfect human selection, which requires the combination of channel mask and the quick selection tool available in Photoshop CS3.

I have received a number of emails lately in regards to this topic and I have decided to post this short tutorial with a step-by-step guide for beginners. Once you master this skill, you can apply it to pretty much every human image you want to selection/extract.

Meanwhile, if you have any tips/tricks about making selections, you’re more than welcome to share your experience with us, just drop a comment below :)

Although this is not a formal photo effect tutorial but rather a tip/trick, I have created a final image here:

OK let’s get started!

To complete this tutorial, you will need to the following stock image:

Girl

Step 1

Load the Girl stock image into Photoshop. We know the ultimate goal is to seperate the girl from the rest of the image, but how do we start. Firstly let’s take a look at the image:

1. The overall lighting is quite good and it doesn’t have a lot of colour variation.
2. This is a human portrait so that means taking out the hairs and making selection around it will be difficult.
3. You may think of using Pen Tool, but what happen if you’re just not that good at it??

After those thoughts above, it’s time to get down to business. To begin with, let’s take a look at the channels in the channel palatte and select the “Blue” channel as shown below:

The reason I chose the “Blue” channel here is because it provide the biggest contrast from the model to the background, comparing with the Red and Green channel.

Step 2

Now we’re are on the blue channel. The second thing we’re going to do is to increase the contrast as much as we can, while preserving the hair bits. To  do this, we can make a duplication of the “Blue” Channel by right-click and choose “Duplicate channel”.

On the “Blue Copy” channel, go to Image > Adjustment > Brightness /Contrast  and apply the following settings:

Then hit Ctrl + L and bring up the level adjustments tool, apply the following settings:

and you will have the following effect:

Step 3

Now we will have to use the power of the Quick Selection tool to select the light colour part of the girl’s body. To do this, simply grab the Quick Selection tool (W) from the tool box, set the brush size to 2px and tick “Auto-Enhance” option, make a selection of the white part as shown below:

Hint: make use the + and – quick selection tool available on the option bar for adjustments, don’t worry about the hair bits on the outside as they’re already in black colour.

When you finish the selection, simply fill it with black colour:

De-select the image when you’re done, if you see a white gap on the girl body, simply use a black brush to fill it.

Step 4

Now you will see around the girl’s body (which is in Black), there are some areas cover in dark grey colour. We must get rid of them in order to make our selection better. To do this, simply use the Quick Selection Tool to make a selection around the girl, then press Ctrl + Shift + I and inverse this selection. Grab the Eraser Tool to gently erase those dark grey bits off:

The reason we make the selection is that by doing so, we will not accidentally erase the parts on the girl’s body.

Here is the effect so far:

Now we have successfully completed a Channel Mask, which we

Step 5

Now we can go back to the layer palatte, go to select > load selection and choose the following:

and you will see now the model is selected:

Press Ctrl + J and make a duplication of the selection, and create a new layer in between and fill it with white colour, you will see we have now successfully make a pretty good selection for the girl model:

Step 6

Now we can of course fine tune the image a bit by using the Sharpen Filter. Go to Filter > Sharpen > Smart Sharpen and apply the following settings:

Also add a series of adjustment layers on top of it will help to bring out extra light and contrast: (Go to Layer > Adjustment Layer)

For all adjustment layers, make sure to tick the “Use previous layer as clipping mask” option.

Black and White:

Levels

Curves

Hue and Saturation

and here is the effect so far:

Step 7

Now we have a perfect girl image, without any background and great to work on as a starting point. It’s time to use your imagination and creativity :) I simply use some custom brushsets from qbrushes.com and add some patterns in the background, adjusted the colour balance a bit.

That’s for this tutorial! Hope you enjoy it and find it useful, drop me a comment if you have any question, I will try my best to help you out.

Cheers and have a nice day!

In this tutorial, I will show you the processes I used to design this awesome space dancer scene with Nebula Texture in Photoshop. The inspiration of the tutorial in fact came from the latest “Prince of Persia” game cover (and yes, I do love this game very much!)

Together we will be using image adjustment options, layer blending, masking and filter effect. I will also like to emphasise that it’s very importance to choose the right stock texture for your design, as they will contribute and improve your final effect dramatically.

This is an fairly easy tutorial and I hope you enjoy it! Have a try!

Here is the preview of the final result:

alternative version I have: (adjusted the colour balance and add two planets into it)

PSD File for this Tutorial

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OK Let’s get started!

To complete this tutorial, you will need the following stocks:

Dancer

Nebula Texture 1

Nebula Texture 2

Step 1

Load the dancer image into Photoshop and resize the image to 1200px * 1477px. The purpose of resizing image is to make it rough the same size as the textures we’re going to apply on it.

Make a duplication of the background layer, hit Ctrl + Alt + Shift + B and apply the Black and White adjustment Tool with following settings:

Name this duplicated layer “black and white”. Make another two duplications of this “black and white” layer and change the blending mode of those two duplicated to “Hard Light”.

You will have the following effect so far:

Step 2

Load the “Nebula texture 1″ image into Photoshop, copy and paste it onto our dancer document. This will create a new layer and let’s name it “nebula texture 1″.

On this “nebula texture 1″ layer, go to Edit > Transform > Free Transform (or Ctrl + T), resize, rotate this layer as you wish, the ultimate goal is to find a position where the outer part of the nebula image is surrounding the model.

When you’re satisfied, right-click this nebula texture 1 layer and choose “create clipping mask”.

Here is the effect so far:

Now we can go on and add some image adjustments layers for the nebula layer, so as to make it more stand-out.

From bottom to top, we add the following image adjustment layers: (make sure you tick the “use previous layer to create clipping mask” option for every one of them)

Color Balance

Levels

On this Levels adjustment layer, apply the following layer mask:

Brightness and Contrast

and you will have the following effect so far:

Step 3

Load the “Nebula Texture 2″ into Photoshop, copy and paste it onto our dancer document and use the Free Transform Tool (Ctrl + T) to resize, rotate until it fits into the canvas.

Name this layer as “nebula texture 2″ and change its blending mode to “soft light” and you will have the following effect: (I hide the previous “nebula texture 1″ layer and its related adjustment layers)

To add a bit more contrast to this “Nebula Texture 2″ layer, we can add a Curve Adjustment layer  (Make sure to tick the “use previous layer to create clipping mask” option) with the following settings:

Here is the effect afterwards:

Step 4

Make all layers visible, you image should now look like this:

Now we can do some retouch of the image. I personally feel the colour contrast is a bit too much, so I add another Hue/Saturation Adjustment Layer on top of all layers, with the following settings:

You will now have this effect:

You can of course try out other adjustment tools and see what result that bring you.

Step 5

Now we can add some motion into the image. To do this, flatten the image (I would suggest before you flatten the image, save a copy of the existing file, then the save the flattened image as a new psd file), duplicate the background layer once and go to Filter > Blur > Radial Blur and apply the following options:

Change the blending mode of the duplicated layer to “Screen” and opacity to 80%, you will have the following final effect:

OK, that’s it for this tutorial! You can of course add some of your own texture or filter effect and see what the end results are! Remember to always keep your own creativity!

Here is an alternative version I have: (adjusted the colour balance and add two planets into it)

Hope you enjoy this tutorial, drop me a comment if you have any question, I will try my best to help you out.

Cheers and have a nice day!