From the course: Drawing and Painting in Photoshop

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Clipping masks

Clipping masks - Photoshop Tutorial

From the course: Drawing and Painting in Photoshop

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Clipping masks

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- [Narrator] I'm using a layer mask here, to define the shape of the foliage of my tree, and this comes in very handy because I can now work in the colors of my layer, and don't have to worry about painting over the edge, because the edge of the tree here is defined by the layer mask. And this helps me great deal here to add some lighting to my tree. And now I want to show you an additional masking technique. It is called a clipping mask and a clipping mask is a special kind of masking techniques where you use the transparency of one layer to mask of another layer. As an example, I now want to add some dark shadows here, into my tree trunk, and I could do that by simply locking the transparency of my tree trunk. Now pick the color of the tree and use a darker version of it, and now I could just paint in the dark shadows with the transparency being protected, but I can also do it by using a clipping mask. And for that I would create a new layer on top of my tree trunk layer, like this.…

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