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-> Masking

Masking is quite usefull if you dont want to actually erase parts of a picture!
We're going to create a nice Text-Mask Effect which will look like this:

Beautiful, isnt it? :)

Masking is simple to understand. Quote from Adobe's Photoshop Manual:

"Masks control how different areas within a layer or layer set are hidden and revealed. By making changes to the mask, you can apply a variety of special effects to the layer without actually affecting the pixels on that layer. You can then apply the mask and make the changes permanent or remove the mask without applying the changes."

Got that?
you also need to know how to create new layer and then add a Mask. There are two buttons in your "Layers" window.

New Layer Button and the Add Mask Button

After you learnt the most important part of masking we're going to use it. We open a new file, add our Picture and a text we want to use. First layer is the Text Layer then the picture and at last (but not least) the background (i had a fourth layer as background). Our "Layers" window should look like this:

I just see i forgot the Text Layer, sorry =)

Now select the Layer where you want to add a mask (in our case, the picture layer), we press the Add mask button and..... what a surprise we added a mask

A miracle!


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