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Basic Photoshop—Layer Masks

This Article Features Photo Zoom

I use to consider the use of Layer Masks in Photoshop to be an advanced technique, but it has become such a commonplace and important part of postprocessing photos, that I now think of it as a basic skill that all Photoshop users need to have in their arsenal. It can seem a little confusing at first, but once you understand how it works it’s really quite simple and powerful.

Basically, a Layer Mask lets you cover up part of a layer in Photoshop to reveal what’s in the underlying layers. You can have two layers with different content that you can blend together, or two layers with the same content processed differently that you want to combine, but with only selected portions of each layer. For this example, I'm using the same image on both layers, but with one layer in color and the other in black-and-white.

Starting with a color image, I duplicate the image so that I have two layers with identical content. I then converted the top layer to black-and-white. When I do this, the black-and-white image is all you see because it’s the top layer. I then add a Layer Mask to this top layer by clicking on the Layer Mask icon at the bottom of the layers palette (it looks like a gray rectangle with a circle cut out of the center).

With the top layer highlighted, click on the Layer Mask icon to add a Layer Mask.

Once a Layer Mask is added to a layer, all you need to do is paint on the image with black to reveal the bottom layer. I like to use the Paintbrush Tool to add the black, using a brush with a hardness of 0, feathering the mask so that it’s easier to get the edges of the mask to look seamless (you also need to make sure your foreground color is set to black since the brush will paint with the whatever foreground color you have set). With this image, wherever I paint with black, the color image underneath will be revealed.

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