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

913 Two ways to mask gradient effects

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

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913 Two ways to mask gradient effects

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- [Instructor] In this movie, I'll show you two different ways to go about masking a gradient effect. And the idea is once again, I want to bring back the original red of the model's lips. But as you can see, I'm applying the colors a bit more playfully. One might even argue more approximately, and that's because while gradient layers support layer masks, gradient overlay effects do not. So we have to take very different approaches. All right, so I'll go ahead and switch to our composition so far. And I'll click on that layer that's called VY. That is violet to yellow. And you can see if I turn off the Amazon layer for a moment that we go in a linear fashion from violet over here on the left, through a bunch of intermediate colors, to a shade of yellow over here on the right. All right, I'm going to go ahead and add a layer mask by dropping down to the add layer mask icon at the bottom of the layers panel and clicking on it. And that will give us a white mask. Now you want to select the Brush tool, which you can get by pressing the B key. And then go ahead and tap the D key to instate the default foreground and background colors. Which means white is the foreground color because we're working inside of a mask. Now press the X key to switch those colors so the foreground color is black. I'll also right-click inside the image window so I can show you that I have a size value of 175 points, and I've cranked the hardness value up to a hundred percent so that we're really seeing those edges. All right, now just go ahead and click in the center of the model's lips over here on the right side of the image. And then I'll move my cursor down just a little bit to one of these highlights on her lip and I'll click again in order to make sure we have lots of wiggle room. And then I'll do the same with the purple model. I'll go ahead and click in the center of the lips like so, and then I'll move my cursor down a little bit so that it's centered on the bottom lip and I'll click. And incidentally, if you're wondering how in the world I'm seeing a little plus sign at the center of my cursor, here's what you do. You press Control + K or Command + K on the Mac to bring up the Preferences dialog box. Then you select Cursors from the left-hand list, and you turn on this guy, Show Crosshair in Brush Tip. And that way you're always seeing that center point. In any event, I'll go ahead and click OK. And now what I want to do is soften the transitions by double-clicking on the layer mask's thumbnail, which in a perfect world, will bring up the properties panel. That is another preference setting, by the way. If you find yourself getting switched to the select and mask workspace, and you don't much like that behavior, well, then I would agree with you, and my recommendation would be to once again, press Control + K or Command + K on the Mac in order to bring up the preferences dialog box, and then select Tools in this left-hand list and turn off this checkbox, Double Click Layer Mask Launches Select and Mask Workspace, which is a lot of overhead for a double-click in my opinion. Go ahead and turn it off and then click OK. And the thing is, you can always get to the select and mask workspace any old time you like just by switching to a selection tool, such as the Rectangular Marquee up here. And then you've got a select and mask button up here in the options bar. Or for that matter, now that you have things set up so that when you double-click a layer mask, it opens the properties panel, it contains a select and mask button as well. In any event, this is the guy I'm looking for, Feather. I'm going to increase this value to 25 pixels, which temporarily blurs the edges of that mask. Now, you can change it to anything. And by that I mean you can change it anytime you like to a different value. But as they say, 25 is what I'm going to go with. And then we'll press the Enter key to accept that change. And I will hide the properties panel. All right, now we need to do the same with the Amazon layer. So I'll go ahead and turn that layer on. And I will double click on this gradient overlay effect. Now, you cannot mask layer effects inside Photoshop. So we're going to have to come up with a completely different approach. And so the first thing I'm going to do is switch the style to radial so that we're creating concentric rings of color. And then I'll click on the gradient bar to bring up the gradient editor dialog box. And I'm going to take this first shade of green right here, and I'm going to drag it over until I see a location value of 15%. And also move my opacity setting to 15%. And then I'll create a copy of this color stop by Alt or Option + dragging it to the left. And if your cursor gets stuck to it, just click again in order to get rid of it. You just need to make sure you don't create more than one. All right, now I'm going to double-click on that guy to open the color picker dialog box, and I'll just change the hue value to zero degrees so I can better see what I'm doing and I'll click OK. And now I'll go ahead and drag this guy over until I'm seeing a location of 13 degrees, just so I can see exactly where the center of that effect is. All right now, I'll click OK. And by virtue of the fact that we have a very obvious circle, that means you can easily drag it to a different location. So I'm going to drag it from the center of the nose here to the center of the lips. And if you mess up, if you drag it to some other location and you want to reset things, you do have this button right here, Reset Alignment. And that will go ahead and center that effect. But I want to move it down, so I'm going to drag it down like so. And I just want to make sure that that red circle is centered on the mouth. And you can change its shape by the way, by changing the style setting to diamond. And that's going to give you a diamond shape that you might actually prefer when working with a lip. But I'm going to switch back to radial. But I don't want the effect to be this harsh. I want to smooth things out. So I'll click on the gradient bar once again, and I will take this red color stop all the way back to a location value of zero. And then I'll click up here in order to create a new opacity stop, move it to a location of zero, and set the opacity value to zero as well so that we have a nice soft transition. All right, now I want to move these guys farther out. So I'll move both the color stop here, as well as the opacity stop above the bar to location values of 75%. And then I'll click OK to accept that change, and I'll click OK once again to dismiss the layer style dialog box. And those are a couple of different ways to mask a gradient effect, either by applying a conventional layer mask to an independent gradient layer, or by creating a transparent hole in a gradient overlay effect.

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