Layer Masks in PSE

Please note this tutorial is taken from CoffeTeaPhotography.


You have no idea what you are missing! You can't be a successful photo-editor until you conquer your fear of layer masks.

First, what is a layer mask? Imagine a beautiful stained-glass window, filled with light from the sun. Take a piece of white printer paper and tape it over part of that window. You will still be able to see the stained-glass colors and design through the paper. Take some black paint and paint the center of the paper black. Where you painted black you are not able to see through to the stained-glass window anymore. In photo-editing, the stained glass window is your image. The white piece of printer paper is your layer mask. The white layer mask will allow enhancements you do on that layer of your image to show through. The white is completely translucent in editing programs. If you paint over the white layer mask with black paint, it will make the mask opaque where it is black and the enhancements will not show through in those areas.

Now tape up a piece of thick black construction paper on that stained glass window. You don't see the stained glass colors and design. A layer mask filled with black completely blocks any of that layer's enhancements. However, if you paint over that black mask with a white brush, it "reveals" the enhancements on that layer.

It gets even more exciting than that. When you paint over layer masks you can adjust the opacity of your brushes. Say you have a layer with a white layer mask. If you set your black brush to 50% opacity, then 50% of that enhancement on that layer will be blocked. Paint over a black mask with a 10% white brush, and only 10% of that enhancement on that layer will come through.

The pictures you see below demonstrate the importance of a layer mask. The first photo is very warm with yellowish/reddish colors. I wanted to make it a bit more moody and cold with added blues, however I did not want my skin tones to be too blue. Yet the original skin tones would appear too orange compared to the colder background. The middle photo shows what my image would look like without a layer mask, the last photo shows that I masked out some of the blue from the model's skin to make it look more normal.