Isolating an image element

I have opened Water drops.jpg, which is found inside the 27_pen_tool folder, and…those of you who've been with me for the long haul may recall this image from…the Navigation chapter, back in the Fundamentals portion of this series.…The image comes to us from Victor Burnside of the Fotolia Image Library, and…what we are going to do is we are going to take one of these beautiful details…here, this forward drop, and we are going to isolate it from the rest of the…image to produce this file right here, it's called Isolated drop.psd, and it…forces us to view this detail basically out of context.…

Then we could set some type around the image, if we are bringing it into another…document and so forth.…So it's a fairly simple construction what we have going here.…If I turn off the top layer, you can see behind it we have a copy of that same…layer with a rather amorphous layer mask assigned to it.…It's pretty easy to draw this mask actually.…It's all painted in.…It's just a hand-painted mask.…So nothing all that difficult about it, however the top layer is extremely…