From the course: Photoshop Masking and Compositing: Fundamentals

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Releasing and masking layer effects

Releasing and masking layer effects - Photoshop Tutorial

From the course: Photoshop Masking and Compositing: Fundamentals

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Releasing and masking layer effects

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In this exercise I'll show you how to convert layer effects into layers so that we can mask them. I've saved my progress to Shark with shadow.psd it's found inside the 06_color_range folder and the idea is I would like to mask this inner shadow effect that's creating these highlights here so that the highlights aren't quite this bright. Now you might figure the solution is to just dial down the opacity of that inner shadow effect. However, if we do that then we'll end up losing the highlights along the tail and along the top portion of the shark that are currently in great shape. So I'd rather get some selective control. The thing is you can't actually apply a mask to a layer effect. So instead what you need to do is convert the effects into layers and here's how that works. I'm going to click on the shark layer to make it active. Now I don't want to lose my layer effects not permanently. So I'm going to go ahead and copy them onto the shadow layer, just in case I need to come back to…

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