Alright, I planned on doing this tutorial MONTHS ago… finally got around to it today!

Layer masks are AWESOME! You can use them to mask parts of an image… this has a similar effect as using your eraser, except you never actually lose any parts of your image. If you use a layer mask to “erase” you can later bring back the part that you “erased.” Cool, huh?

PSE does not have layer masks… UNLESS you download a plug-in! Go download Grant’s Tools (make sure you DL the one for your version of PSE). You install these tools just like you isntall actions or layer styles. Here are the instructions that the site gives you for installing, but you may need to install them a different way depending on your version of PSE and your OS. I have PSE 5 and Windows Vista, so I installed it under C:/Program Data (I had to reveal hidden folders)/Adobe/Photoshop Elements/5.0/Photo Creations/Special Effects/Grants Tools. Make sure you have a folder dedicated to Grant’s Tools. The next time you open PSE, Grant’s Tools will show up in your Artwork & Effects palette (same place you find layer styles/dropshadows/actions).

ALL SCREENSHOTS ARE CLICKABLE SO YOU CAN GET A CLOSER LOOK.

So, I’ve got this ribbon and a tag. I want the ribbon to look like it’s threaded through the tag hole. So, I click on my tag and then apply the layer mask to it by clicking on the Masks Layer icon under Grant’s Tools in my Special Effect palette and press Apply.

Once the layer mask is applied, your layer will look like this in the layers palette. Notice how the mask is selected (you can tell by looking at the corners of the white icon)? Everytime you click on another layer and want to go back to this layer, you’ll need to actually click on the mask’s icon to activate the layer mask if you want to mask parts of your element. Does that make sense? hehe… once you play with it, you’ll understand.

I only want to mask the part of the tag that will be “covered” by the ribbon. To guide my masking, I’m going to select the ribbon by first activating my layer mask and then holding down CTRL and then clicking on the ICON of the ribbon layer in the layers palette. Now you’ll see the “marching ants” around the ribbon on my canvas. This means that when I mask my tag that I’ll be limited to that selection… or it will not “erase” parts of my tag that I don’t want it to.

Layer masks work with black and white. You will use a black brush to “erase” or mask and a white brush to unmask and bring things back. So, I make sure my layer mask is active and that I have the marching ants selection, then I set my foreground to black and my background color to white. Once my foreground is set to black, I select my brush and brush over the tag and the selection I want erased.

See? It only masked the part I wanted it to! Now it looks like the ribbon is threaded through the tag.

So, what do I do if I later decide I want to move that tag somewhere else? If you had actually used your eraser to do this, that part of your tag will be lost. Since I used a layer mask, I can bring back the part I masked! So, I activate the layer mask and set my foreground to white and brush over the tag to bring it back! Easy as pie!

Was that confusing? It might sound confusing, but once you actually use a layer mask, you’ll totally get it! I use these ALL THE TIME. Layer masks are absolutely fabulous!

This entry was posted on Friday, February 6th, 2009 at 12:09 pm and is filed under Tips and tutorials. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.