Layer Masks Made Easy: Using Shapes in Adobe Photoshop

1. Layer Masks Made Easy: Using Shapes in Adobe Photoshop: Hey, I'm Paul. I'm a Graphic Designer and Illustrator, who teaches here on Skillshare. This is a short format Adobe Photoshop class. Today we'll be looking at building a mask using a vector shape in the software. If you've taken any of my classes before, you know that I am an absolute poster boy for the use of layer masks. They're in this class, this class, this class, this class, and those won't be the last. It is such a useful tool to add to your arsenal as a digital illustrator. This mini class is perfect for those who've been looking for a new way of masking in Photoshop or those who are growing their skill set, and have limited time. Short for me. Short for you. Let's get into it. So we're over in Adobe Photoshop. Let's say you've made a new PSD, the size really doesn't matter, and it's going to come out white or transparent depending on what you've done, but I've just put a little background here from the class that this technique is an updated on just so it's not too boring because nobody's good time for that. I'm going to go ahead and bring in the same artwork that we do in the class. There's a design label and there's a background color that would have been applied to the can in the production phase. They're going to open up pretty gigantic. I'll just take these sizes down a little bit. I'm going to slip both of them and open, and I will drag that one there. Drag that one in there. Pose those two. Okay. I'm going to quickly go up here and just align them, and then we can scale them down. The fit the canvas nicely. Believe it or not apart from the lid, we are almost a third of the way and making a derogn can out of this. I want to show you the updated way of making a mask photoshop. We're not using the black and white and painting anything or etching around it or select subject, anything like that. We're just going to hit you on the keyboard. Now, see what that goes to there. This same shortcuts can do a rectangle, ellipse a triangle polygon, and if you dare this custom shape tool, you can put an image inside a boat, even in the latest photoshop, I don't know who's doing that, but anyway, we're going to use the rectangle now for this demo. It does have a radius on. This will usually be on zero, but because I've done this before, it's sid 30. I'm just going to drag around those two shapes. Now that mask is grayed out because in the layers panel, they're both selected. If I just select one, I can suddenly mask it and look what it's done to those edges there. They've got the corner radius supplied. If I undo that with control Z, I've still got that part selected. I'm going to select both of these things and part them in a group together. They're still there. They're just grouped together as an item. But now I need to I've lost my toolp here. What do I do? I hit you again on my keyboard and I'm back. I can hit mask. Now that mask is applied to the group. The advantage here is they are both getting locked inside that shape. Even though this one isn't touching the edge, what it now means is I can do anything to either of these two while the mask is active and it's going to go outside. S I wanted My can in this instance to be seen from three quarter angle. Drag that over. You've seen this in 1 million mock up reels, and that's the basics of masking using vector shapes and adobe photoshop. Let's take the guesswork out of the project for this one. You don't need to stretch your brain. You're taking a short class because you're busy. How about you have a crack as quick as you can at replicating the method we did so you put that label on the can, like I showed you in the lesson. This is a quick win and an easy way to learn the tool. And once you're done, remember to add your work to the project gallery here on skill share where I can give you feedback on it. I do like to give feedback within 24 hours and your fellow students will be able to see it too. Let's build up a collection of these things and make sure we're all moving forward in Adobe Photoshop. Piece out.