From the course: Deke's Techniques (2018-2021)

911 Hand painting a symmetrical layer mask

From the course: Deke's Techniques (2018-2021)

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911 Hand painting a symmetrical layer mask

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- [Instructor] All right now, that mask I created at the end of the previous movie allows us to see all three faces. However, it's a tragically simple mask. All it is is a feather direct angle. And so if I were to go ahead and double click on the thumbnail for this layer mask here inside the layers panel, or in some other way bring up the properties panel, and then reduce that editable feather value all the way down to zero, you can see that we have some very harsh transitions. What I want instead is to create an absolutely symmetrical hand-painted mask, which is something you can do inside Photoshop. So step one is to take that layer mask right there and go ahead and tap the D key so you have your default colors down here at the bottom of the toolbox. That is white for the foreground and black for the background. And then press Control + Backspace. That's going to be Command + Delete on the Mac, in order to fill the layer mask associated with the Amazon group with black. All right, now go up to the View menu and choose New Guide and then make sure the orientation is set to vertical, and change the position value to 50%, and click OK. And you'll create a center guide down the middle of the document. All right, now I'm going to zoom out a little bit. And armed with my rectangular marquee tool, which is available up here at the top of the toolbox, I'm going to marquee the right half of this image like so. So all the way from the right side of the canvas to that vertical guideline. All right now, I'll go ahead and zoom back in a little bit, and I'll switch to the brush tool, which has a keyboard shortcut of B. And I'll right-click inside the image window so I could show you that the brush size for me is currently set to 500 pixels, and the hardness is 0%. Very important, that last one. And now I'm just going to start painting this guy's face. And as a result of the fact that the left half of the image is deselected, I'm not able to paint inside of it. So I'll just go ahead and paint up here. And I want their hairs to merge right here in the center. And so if you paint too far, you can just tap the X key in order to swap your foreground and background colors so that you're painting now with black. Just go ahead and paint in some of the right-most person's hair. And then I'll press the X key again in order to switch my foreground color to white so that I can paint in this shoulder like so. And I want to make sure I'm painting all the way into this area and up into the neck. And if you want to confirm that you don't have any gaps in your mask, then you can Alt or Option + click on this thumbnail here inside the layers panel in order to view the mask independently of the image. So anywhere where we're seeing white, we're viewing the contents of this group. Anywhere where we're seeing black, we're hiding the contents of the group. All right, I'll go ahead and Alt or Option + click on that item again. And then I'll just go ahead and paint right there on the shoulder. And I'm just adding a few clicks here and there just to make sure that the shoulder is ultimately opaque. Alright, now I want to take everything I've made so far and flip it horizontally. And you can do that by pressing Control + Alt + T. That's Command + Option + T on the Mac. Control or Command + T invokes the free transform mode. The fact that you also press the Alt or Option key means you'll create a copy of this selection. All right, now I want you to go up to the options bar and notice this little reference point matrix? If it's dimmed for you, just as it is for me, then select this checkbox. And that way you'll be able to see your origin point, that target, on the woman's nose. I want it to be all the way over here, so I'll just drag it over until it snaps into alignment with that left handle. And then I'll just right-click anywhere inside the image window and choose Flip Horizontal. And that will flip a copy of the contents of that layer mask. And then I'll press the Enter key or the Return key on the Mac to accept that change. And I'll press Control + D or Command + D the on the Mac in order to deselect the image. And now if I were to zoom in, and also go up to the View menu and choose Clear Guides, you can see that we have an absolutely symmetrical effect throughout the entire composition. And that is how you hand paint the horizontally symmetrical layer mask here inside Photoshop.

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