Painting away the contents of a layer with a mask

asks are incredibly powerful, and we're going to take a look at how we can tart to work with masks in order to make an adjustment to a specific area of our image. nd the beauty of working with masks is that they allow us to continually edit or odify what we've worked on. ell, here in this image, you can see I have two layers. I have the background ayer, I also have this black and white layer, just a desaturated version of he same exact image. ell, I want to combine these two layers together so that rather than having verything desaturated, I have everything in black and white. And the pumpkin on his little guy head is going to be orange or the original color.

e can do that by working with what's called a mask. et me show you what I mean. ell, if you have a layer like this layer here, you can click on an icon which s located at the base of the Layers panel. t kind of looks like there's a hole punched through it, and if you click on that con, it'll create a mask. urrently this mask is white. hen it comes to masks, white reveals and black conceals. n other words, I can now reveal everything. see all of the desaturated image, yet I can change that by painting away part f the area that I see here.

e could do so by clicking on our Brush tool. ow with the Brush tool, we want to paint with black, so you can go down here to our color picker, and you can go to the default colors and then flip them by licking on this icon here so that black is in your foreground color. ith our brush, we'll go ahead and just roughly here start to paint. As we do hat, you can start to see that we're seeing some of the orange of the pumpkin. ell, how is that possible? What's happening? et's turn off the off the background layer and see if we can figure this out.

ell, what's happened is I now have this little black dot on my mask where I ainted. That black is now concealing or hiding this part of the image. e can get really precise with this. We could change our brush size by pressing he left bracket key and make that smaller, and I can just go ahead and paint way the pumpkin that I'm seeing here, in other words, the desaturated version of the pumpkin. n a sense, I kind of have this hole. It's like I've erased part of the image, ut I really haven't, because if ever I make a mistake--and you can see I've made mistake over here--you can just go ahead and paint with white and then you can ring that area back.

o as you do that, you can either reveal or conceal part of your layer. et's turn on the background layer so that this looks a little bit more interesting. ell, now here, we can see that we're seeing through to the underlying layer ecause this mask is allowing us to hide part of what's on this top layer, I should say. o, again, we can just go ahead and paint around this in order to fix this up, and ere I think I can illustrate making a mistake a little bit more clearly. et say that we accidentally paint across this area of our photograph.

ou can see I'm bringing in some of the skin tone. ell, on my mask, that black, it's concealing this part of the image. ell, if I don't want that, if I want to remove that just paint with white. Here 'll press the right bracket key to make my brush bigger, and I'll just go ahead nd once again reveal these adjustments here, and you can see that I'm doing his is just by cleaning up my mask a little bit and painting through that area. ow what I have is I have this adjustment, which is really quite powerful.

his mask, it allows me to limit something, and this isn't just helpful when you have ultiple layers like we have here, this is helpful in all sorts of situations. n other words, masking, it's really one of the cornerstones, it's one of the oundations of what you're going to do in Photoshop because it gives you lexibility and also precise control about the type of adjustments that you can ake to your photographs. ell, let's take a look at a few other scenarios where we can use masks, and et's do that in the next few movies.