Masking in Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign

1. Introduction Masking: If I had to pick one fundamental technical skill that every graphic designer needs, it would be masking without a doubt. I'm Martin. I have over 20 years of experience as a graphic designer, illustrator and Adobe certified instructor. I have worked with companies like BBC, these knee, Google, ikea. I cannot wait to share my best practices with you. This is a streamlined hands-on course focusing on mastering all the various masking techniques in Adobe InDesign applications. I will be walking you through everything step-by-step and you will get all the exercise files so you can follow along. We will start in Adobe Photoshop and learn how and when to use the Quick Mask feature. What's the difference between a pixel and vector mask? When to use clipping masks and how to mosques adjustments and filters effectively. We then move on to Adobe Illustrator masking techniques, including the Draw Inside feature, opacity and clipping masks, and ways to combine them for best results. Finally, we will spend some time in Adobe InDesign and learn about frames and various techniques to use them in a creative way. We will also learn about Photoshop Paths, alpha channels, and how to create interesting out-of-bounds effects. You can join this course without any prior knowledge in graphic design and illustration or Adobe applications. But to complete the project, you will need access to Adobe Creative Cloud and a desktop or laptop computer, but now it's time to start creating. So I will see you in the next lesson. 2. How a selection works?: First of all, before we talk about masking, we need to understand how a selection works, because, believe it or not, that's the key of understanding how to do masking. So when I create just the normal rectangular marquee selection, this already creates a separation between the active and inactive parts. So if I use something like the brush tool and start painting, you can see already my brushstrokes will only be visible within the selection. So why is this important? Because when you are creating mosques, you are essentially going to hide and show details, just like here within the selection, we can see what we're doing. But outside of the selection, we have no effect on what's happening. So I'm just going to undo this one step and we will actually create a useful selection on this image. So let's say I want to make a selection of this lady. I'm going to go to the Select menu and choose subjects, which relies on the Adobe Sensei, artificial intelligence built into Photoshop, which analyzes the image and tries to guess what's the subject. And you can see it did a really good job in this case. So now we see our selection as these marching ants, which is like the default view for our masks. But if I press Q on the keyboard, that is going to switch to the Quick Mask view. And this is almost like a transition between a selection and the mask. You don't necessarily have to do this, but this gives you a better idea of what is going to be visible and what is going to be hidden once the selection is turned into a mosque. Now, the default color for the hidden details or most areas would be red. I actually change this setting to blue because I found it easier to work with most images. This is something you can do by double-clicking on this icon here. That's the Quick Mask icon. And then you can change the color here. You can even change how much overlay you want to have on the mask areas. I just kept it at the default 50 per cent. Once again, you toggle back and forth with the Q keyboard shortcut whenever you want to switch to this view or back to the normal selection view. And why is this view useful apart from visualizing our selection? Well, this is where masking techniques starts to come into play. Because for example, if I use my brush tool with black and white colors, I can hide and show details. So with painting with black, I can hide details that I don't need. And with white, I can reveal details. So if I just zoom a little bit closer here, I think on the shoulder, we can include a little bit more that got lost in the subject selection. So if I press X on the keyboard, I can switch to white color. I can just paint over this detail here, make sure we're not chopping off any details from the shoulder. So if I want to again remove a bit from it, I can just press X and then paint over a little bit more here on these details, something like that. So we'll refine that edge selection. Now of course, the hair is not perfect for that. Photoshop has other features which I'm going to show in a moment. But for now, all I wanted to show you is that working in the Quick Mask Mode can help to refine your selection before you turn it into a mask. So when you want to turn it into a mosque, just make sure you press Q again to go back into the normal selection view first, and then click on the Japanese flag icon here on the bottom right as the Add Layer Mask option, which will turn it into a finalized layer mask. And this is a pixel mask because we will be creating vector masks later on. For now, we created a pixel mask. So first of all, if you want to see your mosque, how it actually looks, you can hold down the Alt or Option key and click on the Mask thumbnail. That way you see how Photoshop handles these pixel masks. And you can see exactly that. White is used to show details and the black is used to hide details. So why choose black hides? The best analogy is light itself. So wherever there is light, you can see things and whenever there's darkness you don't see things. Why I chose black hides. That's how I remember it. Now, if I want to see details here on the selection, I can zoom closer. And the reason why I call this pixel mask, or that's technically how it is called, is because it's actually using pixels. This is a very high resolution image, so I had to zoom really close to be able to see these pixels and the anti-aliasing on the edges. But if you are working with pixel months, That's just one of the things that you have to remember. That if you add re-sizing these layers up and down, the quality of your mask is going to degrade, just like the image quality itself, unless you are using a smart object. So there's a lot of technical terms here I'm using. If you're not familiar with Photoshop, this might be a little bit too much, but just bear with me. So let's switch back to the normal view by Alt or Option clicking again on the Mask thumbnail. And let me just demonstrate this to you. So what happens if I use Free Transform, for example, and resize the image Control T or Command T is the shortcut for Fourier transform. And if you hold down Alt or Option key while resizing, it will resize to the center of the image. So once I press Enter, it accepts these changes. And then if I do the same thing, again, drag it up. You will see when I zoom closer that we lost a lot of the original image quality. But also if I check my pixel mask, it also lost a lot of the original details. So instead of doing this before you are resizing a layer with a pixel mask on it, you would like to wrap up both the image and the mask into a smart object. So I would right-click and choose Convert to Smart Object. Then that means we will have the original size or resolution of our high resolution image saved into this layer. And also it applies to the mask itself. So both the mask and the image quality will be preserved in the smart object. And if I need to go back and refine my mask, I can just double-click on the smart object layer thumbnail. And within it, I will be able to refine further my mask. And just like with the Quick Mask, if I need to go closer and show and hide details. So for example, up here I want to start refining the edge. I can use the brush tool as long as I have the mask selected, it's important, not the image, the mask, because if you have the image selected and you start painting, that's obviously painting on the image itself. While if you have the mask selected and you are painting with black, just like in the Quick Mask view, is going to hide details. But masking. And that's probably the most important thing to remember is a nondestructive method, which means even if I make a mistake, like so, I can switch back to drawing with white and I can reveal these details again. So that's probably the most important aspect of working with masks, that you are never deleting any details. 3. Select and mask workspace : Now, I mentioned that with hair selection, there's a much better way of refining edges. And n is actually very simple. Once you have a pixel mask, you just have to double-click on the thumbnail. So double-clicking will take you into the select and mask workspace, which is a dedicated space for refining your selections and masks. And by the way, this is only available in more recent versions of Photoshop. So if you have an older version, you might not have this feature, but instead you will have refined mask, which is quite similar. It's just a different way to get to it. But here in this view, we have a tool which is called Refine Edge brush tool. And with this one, I can just paint over the edge and notice how nicely it starts to bring back all those subtle details that we are losing from the hair. So if I just paint over here as well, I don't go too close inside. I just go around the edges. And even here we can go over it a bit and there you go at some much better result. But further on, if we feel like there's still more missing details, we can paint over them. But eventually obviously Photoshop will struggle to find edges if there's only just very small stray hairs floating around, because it will start to include details from the background as well. So you just have to be careful about how you're using this tool. And of course, there's lots of other options here. So there's plenty of ways of previewing as well. The background, you can see it on black and you can even adjust the opacity so we can see it better. You can see it on white background. And in this case that's probably easier to support what we are missing. So maybe here we can go a little bit further away. There's some have details there as well. But once I click Okay, all of these changes will be updated on the mask. So once again, if I Alt click on the Mask icon, I can see it. What we achieved. Here's a cool technique that I explained in a couple of other videos, and I go into much more detail on these techniques in my Photoshop masterclass and the other courses we have on our course platform. If you want to check them out, the link is in the description. So the technique that I use for refining masks, especially on hair or these fine edge details, which can also be called technically high-frequency edges. So we can use Dodge and Burn tools. What's important is with the Burn tool, you want to use the range set to shadows. And with the dodge tool you want to set the range two highlights. So with the Burn tool, I can very quickly tidy up details like these that are not important. If I'm carefully enough, I am not losing the hair detail here as well. You can see pretty much preserve that strand of hair. But if I want to bring back a little bit more detail on these strands, I can use the dodge tool. I'm using again, shortcuts to switch back and forth. And you can see I can tie the up fairly quickly, these hazy details that we don't need. And I think that's already looking much better. You can get used to seeing details in this mosque view or ghost view as well. Sometimes I call it when I teach in classrooms. So when I click again back, we can see how it looks and we can put a colored background behind it, Let's say Y. And we don't have to work in the mosque view when you have something in the background, you can also just use these tools like the burn and dodge tool, as you can see, while having a background visible. Now of course, this takes longer to refine and hair, hair is one of the most complicated things to select, especially when your original background is complicated and has lots of different colors in it. So I don't want to go into too much depth on this because I want to cover all the different masking techniques instead. So this was just an introduction to how to work with pixel masks and what a pixel mask means. So remember, we actually have this all within a smart objects. So I can go back to that by turning off this document that was open and we can already see how much better the left side is compared to the right side of the hair selection. But even just selecting a person, I wouldn't just rely on a pixel mask. I would actually use the pixel mask only for the hair, for the body, I would use a vector mask. I'm going to get to that. But before we go there, I would like to show you another example of working with pixel masks. And in this case, I combined two images. So we have the original image of this girl, and then I placed the tigers next to her. Now, I can't remember exactly whether she was just standing there or whether she was leaning to something. But I think I just figured out that it would look nicely these two images together. And this is actually from our 365 days of creativity series. If you want to check it out. Again, the link is in the description below. It's a completely free CVs to watch here on our channel. It's one-minute video we covered each day for a whole year in 2018. And if you want to see the more in-depth tutorials for each of those, we have a 30 hours long, actually more than 30 hours long course on our platform, which again, if you subscribe, you can get access to everything for a small monthly fee. Alright, so here we have the mosque on this image with the Tigers. Again, it's a pixel mask. And I started off with a subject selection, and then we find it slightly. But just like before, if I Alt click on this, we can actually see the mask itself. You can see what's visible, what's hidden away. Reason I'm showing you this is because this is always a good thing to do before you finalize an image. Sometimes you don't even notice details like this one here. I wouldn't have noticed unless I check my mask. And once I checked my mask, I can use things like the Brush tool to refine edges. Again, here, there was something left behind from the original details. And even like here on the for, these shouldn't be transparent because anything that is not white will be see-through. So if I Alt click back and forth, we can see that that's actually so it should be solid for so I can use the white brush tool and paint over that detail. Same goes for this part here as well. Once again, if I switch back and forth, It's hardly noticeable. Only visible once we are actually in the mosque view. And the same goes for the ear. Once again, once I paint over it, it comes back and we can see now it is completely solid. So these shouldn't be see-through or transparent. And then the technique that we used in the previous example with the Burn tool. I can use that here as well to tidy up the edge and look how nicely it works here. And that was the Burn tool and then the Dodge tool I can use just to brighten up the edges a bit. Switching back to the Burn tool again and then switching to the brush tool, tidy up the edge, something like that. Alright, so that is obviously a much neater edge already. And the same thing we would be able to do all around here, especially there on the right side. But I don't want to waste more time on this. I just wanted to show you that when you work with pixel masks, always remember to check your mosque view and refine the edge they're using the brush tool, dodge, burn and so on and so forth. And of course, the Select and Mask feature as well, which is very robust and you can do a lot of more advanced techniques with that. 4. Frame Tool: But let's move on to another big category of masking techniques in Photoshop, which is called clipping masks. And first of all, I am going to show you a tool that is one of the most recent tools introduced in CC 2019. It's called the frame tool. Now, I am not a huge fan of this tool, but in a way I'm starting to get used to it and they are improving it. And I know that it's going to become more powerful as we go along. But that's the frame tool. And I picked an image already where it will work quite nicely. With this tool, what I can do is to draw a frame. So I just highlight this area within the frame. And similarly to InDesign, this created this placeholder for us. And if I use this image from the previous example which I have prepared here on a separate layer. I can just use the move tool and drag and drop it onto the placeholder. And it will automatically turn this into a special type of clipping mask. So it's going to mask out the details outside of that rectangle, but similarly to before, it's completely non-destructive. So I can move the image around. I can even resize it if I wanted to, and align it into that frame. So that looks a little bit better, maybe a bit further down, something like that. If you haven't tried the frame tool yet, I highly recommend to check it out. Before we move on to our next example, I wanted to show you a quick technique here that can improve these type of compositions. So to make this more realistic, when I would do is to use these lovely drop shadows that we have here in the original photograph and select them using the selection tool. I'm just going to select them like that. By the way, whenever you are working with selections, just hold down the spacebar while you are making your selections to be able to move it around and refine the position of them. Once you have your selection ready, select the background image and press Command or Control J, that we'll put that onto a separate layer so that selected or isolated. Now I still have it in the original layer. But on this new layer, I'm going to use hue saturation. Or actually there is an even faster way if we go to the adjustments from the Image menu, there is this option called the saturate. Completely get rid of the saturation so it turns into gray scale. And then what I can do is to put this on top of my image. So once I have my image layer turn back on, I can put that these saturated background color on top of it. And I'm just going to switch to multiply blend mode. Now, this is a bit at the moment, too dark, but I'm going to also use another adjustment from here. In the adjustments I just choose Levels and then drag the highlight clipping closer to the histogram there. Now if I click Okay, you can see when I turn this on and off, it just creates that nice shadow on the edges that we wanted to see. So that's all I wanted to show you us as an extra little technique here with this image. But let's move on and talk about clipping masks because the Frame Tool innovate is almost like a cheat. It's not really a clipping mask, but it works similarly to that or even to a vector to an extent. But what is a clipping mask? 5. Clipping Mask: Now a clipping mask can be used in a lot of different ways. But the probably the easiest example is when you have a text layer and in this case is just a single character, this big N character, I'm using the form heavy task, which is a brilliant font. If you want to find it, It's free font. So when I have a character and it's an editable text layer. So if I use the type tool, I can select this, I can make changes to it. But if I put an image layer on top of this, so now it completely covers it. And we can see that it's doesn't follow the shape of that character. But all I have to do to combine these two is to Alt or Option click between the two layers. So that line between the two layers, just click on that. And once I do that, that turns it into a clipping mask. Another way of doing this is to select the layer on top and use Command Option G or Control G, That also will create the clipping between the two of them. So the top layer is clipped onto the layer underneath it. So if you've seen our Illustrator masking video that I explained that you can tell what is your clipping mask in Illustrator by looking at your layers panel. And you will notice a little underline below the name of that layer. The same applies here in Photoshop as well. So we get that little underline there. And the layer clipped onto this mosque, which is the text in this case is our mask, will be indicated with a little arrow pointing downwards. So if I Alt click again between the two layers, that disappears and then it comes back. So these two little things are what you need to look out for to be able to identify where your clipping masks are. So this is obviously a very useful technique. And similarly to the frame tool, we can use the selected image layer and the move tool to move it around. As you can see, I can position it within the text, or I can select the text layer itself and move that around. But the coolest thing with this technique is that I can use the type tool and change this text to whatever I need. So it's still an editable text while having the clipping applied on it. Now if you start combining clipping masks with pixel masks, you can do these cool effect where you have out-of-bounds details coming out. And the way I've done this, if I just turn off these other two layers, is by simply using the same image as a duplicate layer and use a pixel mask on it to highlight these few leaves that I want it to come out from the background. So if I use Alt or Option key to click on the Layer Mask, you can see exactly what I've done there. And with a bit of drop shadow on them, it even has a bit of depth. Once again, this is an example from our 365 days of creativity course and series. So if you want to see other creative projects like this, highly recommend to check it out. So let's move on to another example. This is actually very similar to the previous one, so I won't even spend too much time on it. Once again, we have a word, in this case, same font as before, and nice image on top. Let's turn this into a Clipping Mask, alt click between the two layers and then again have a bit of out-of-bounds effects here, which again relies on a pixel mask. So simple but very effective technique. Again, same example as before, a combination of a clipping and the pixel mask. But let's see yet another example which is slightly different. So here we have an image that was the original black and white photograph that I use. And I just created a separate layer to add a bit of color on the lips. And then I used a pixel mask to separate the lady with the hat from the background. But then what I wanted to do is to have this nice circle, which is likely container. So I just placed that circle behind her or underneath her in the layer structure. And then I can use Alt or Option key to create the clipping. And then have a separate layer which will only show the hat, again creating the out-of-bounds effects. So you can see if I turn off the other layers, I intentionally masked out these parts here. I could even mosque out by using black. All of those details. So the two together works nicely and creates this final result. Without the layer on top, again, it would completely close it into the circle. But with that layer, which is not clipped onto the circle, I can create the out-of-bounds effect again, same exact example as the two previous ones that I showed you. And you can see already that with a combination of masking techniques, you can be very creative and you can come up with so many really cool effects very quickly. Now of course, you can get even more advanced once you start using adjustment layers with clipping masks and also combining vector shapes into a clipping mask. You can see here, in this case, we have quite a lot of layers, so I'm just going to reduce the thumbnail size. That way we can see all of our layers together. A good example would be this layer here. So if I turn it off, we can see those two triangles are combined into one layer. And if I turn off the image, we can just see the triangles themselves. But also notice that I have a gradient map adjustment layer on top, which is also clipped onto those triangles, which I can also turn off. So by default these are just two black triangles on the same layer. It's a vector shape layer. If I select one of these triangles and use the black arrow or nor Path Selection Tool. I can Alt click and drag or Option click and drag and add as many shapes within the same layer as I want. If you create a separate shape, by the way, let's just draw maybe a circle separately. You can see it ends up being on a separate layer. We can combine these two layers by selecting them and using Command or Control E. And that's going to merge them into one layer, but still allow us to select them individually. Now I'm just going to go back here. So I wanted to show you that having these two shapes on the same layer, then adding a layer on top as a clipping layer will create this effect as we've seen it before. And the cool thing about this, if I start moving this around, it moves obviously in both of those shapes. But once I add an adjustment layer, in this case, this gradient map on top, also clipped onto this group. We'll be able to restrict the adjustment to our selected triangles. So it will only apply the gradient map onto that selected area. So just like flipping an image onto a text layer or shapes, you can also clip adjustment layers to any type of layers, once again, or click to remove the clipping Alt, click again to add it back. And now that I showed you this, you probably can tell how I created this composition. Again, if you want to see the whole workflow, this is also from our 365 days of creativity series. And that's all I wanted to show you about clipping masks. So now it's time to talk about vector masks. 6. Creating a Vector mask using the Pen Tool: Now we can talk about vector mask because without the pen tool. And this is one of the most crucial skills that you need to learn if you want to be good at graphic design. Because pen tool can be used for so many different things, including illustration, but also selections. I am going to show you quickly here on this example using the pen tool, a full vector mask creation. So Pen tool selected set to path mode is how you want to start. And then just zoom close because you want to see details. And I'm going to use the starting point maybe somewhere around here. And then click all the way to the top where it's still straight. And then zoom closer and start drawing these curves. Now when you click and drag, you can create curves. And via drawing your curves, you can hold down the space bar to move the currently selected anchor point around value as still drawing it so I can align it and then continue further the curve. I can go up there. I can draw a straight line. I can using the pen tool can be a tricky one. So I'm not going to cover how to work with the pen tool. I have a completely separate course for that if you are interested. And I'm probably going to do more videos on this in the future. But for now, we're just concentrating on masks. So if you're not familiar with this tool, you can check those out. So I'm just going to draw this very quickly and you will see a cool technique here that I'm going to show you. So when you are doing this, you will eventually get to a point where you need to turn around your canvas. I'm just going to make sure it's nice and round there. Okay, so here I find it easier if I use the keyboard shortcuts. So R for rotate, hold it down, click and drag, and then continue drawing. I find it easier to draw these shapes, vector shapes when we have the angle set up to be going slightly up and to the right because I'm right-handed. That's just the direction in which way I can draw these lines better. And I found it much faster if I do it this way. It's actually quite hard to see the edges sometimes, so I'm just being a little bit sloppy here just so you can see quickly the end result. So that's quite a lot of details, but I'm going to try to get through it. And maybe we can even speed up this part. Let me just stop it here for a second because I just realized that there will be all of these little intricate details here on the lens at the bottom. And if I want to do this properly, I would need to go around them one-by-one. Now, instead of using the pen tool, in these cases, I would recommend to use the curvature tool. So instead of drawing each individual points one-by-one, so I could draw one bomb, then the next. And I would keep drawing these slowly by one-by-one, and it's just really hard. Instead, what I will do in these cases is to use the curvature tool with which all I have to do is to click on the corner points. So top and bottom, top and bottom, and look at that, how nicely it's doing it for me. So this is definitely a huge time-saver. So again, just top and the bottom points. So each of these little hills, the top of the hill, and then between the two hills, that's all you need to do. So this can be a huge time-saver, but not only that, it can also reduce the anchor points that you're working with. And that's obviously in these cases are the most important thing as well. You don't want this vector mask to end up having so many different anchor points. So this is still time-consuming and you might be wondering, why am I doing this? Why am I not using a quick selection or magic wand or something like that? Those are the lazy selection towards they can obviously be useful. And I could explain to you how to work with them. But I honestly don't recommend to work with them, especially if you're working on professional projects. Maybe you can start with one of those tools, your selections. But if you are selecting especially hard edge details like objects, in most cases, like this one as well, you will be able to create a much better final result by using the vector mask towards like the Pen Tool Curvature Tool. Alright, we're almost at the end. So by using vector mask on hard edge selections like this, you will be able to refine the edges much faster and easier compared to a pixel mask plus Quick Mask. And all the rest of the quick selection techniques, including magic ones as well, is not going to produce a nice edge detail, especially when you have background colors that are very similar to the actual objects color. So I'm just going to show that quickly to you. Once we get to the end of this. Again, I'm just going to speed it up here because you've seen the important detail and part of this technique. 7. Vector mask and Pixel mask comparison: Okay, so here we have our final vector mask selection. And you can see how complex that bottom part was. I didn't even realize until I started doing it. But this is still a really good example to see the difference. Once we have our path, we can turn this into a vector mask by selecting the layer and then holding down the Command or Control key by clicking on the Japanese flag icon. So that's going to create a vector mask instead of a pixel mask. So let's do that. And the way you can tell that you have a vector mask is that the thumbnail will have a gray background and whatever is visible is going to be white when you select your mask and you use the direct selection tool or the path selection tools, you can actually highlight the shape or the path that you created. So that's included with the new vector mask. Now this creates obviously a very nice crisp edge and its resolution independent by the way. So it's not going to lose quality because it's vector-based. If I create a new layer underneath this, I'm just going to add the solid color layer. Let's just drop that down there. Maybe change this color to something that will make sure that we can see all the details so it stands out a bit more. Okay, That's a very bad color combination, something like this is a bit better. So now if I zoom closer, we'll be able to tell how nice the edge detail is. So obviously, I could refine this further, but just by looking through the edges, I can see that we've done a fairly good job even here at the bottom, at the first attempt, wherever I spot any issues. So let's just be a little bit more critical and zoom closer here. If we find any parts that we would like to refine, we will be able to go over these edges. I'm actually quite happy with most of this. Maybe here I can see a bit of a mistake. So I can go back to my mask, use the direct selection tool and select details like making marquee selection with the direct selection tool. And then if I zoom closer, you can see this probably better. I can move them around so I can push them in a bit. If I felt like there was some detail that wasn't necessary or even here if I want, I can get rid of these, this little bump. Just adjust the curve and then select that point and push it in slightly until we get a better edge detail. So that although it's not a 100% accurate, but I think it looks already better. Here I can see a bit of the edge detail showing. So again, I use direct selection tool and just push this up by using the arrow keys. You can nudge details by one pixel at a time. So up and down arrows, I can adjust that, that looks better. Maybe select these, push them to the left a bit, is looking better too. And then here maybe we can select more of these points. Just move them up a bit. Again, I'm trying to get rid of all of those white details from the original image. Again here maybe we can just select that point direct selection tool and just push it in already, looks much better. And then this is just a highlight here. But if I want, I can push it in as well as slightly that point up there can be pushed in as well, maybe a little bit more. And then we have a much better detail. So now let's compare this to a pixel mask. So the sloppy and fast way of doing the selection would be to get rid of our vector mask. And I'm going to turn off this other layer as well. Having this layer selected, I can go first, let's just try the subject selection. That's probably the laziest option there is. And it is actually going to do quite a good job. But of course, it will be struggling and making selections on these fine details, especially when there's not enough contrast on the edges. It even struggles here on the left side. So if I press Q on the keyboard shortcut, that's horrible. That edge detail, again here on the top, really bad. And I wouldn't even bother using the tools like the quick mask and refine the edges because it's never going to be as nice, crisp, and smooth as a vector mask. So that's why learning the pen tool is crucial. It's very important. I'm not even going to waste time on showing you the differences between the magic wand, the Quick Selection Tool, and the color range because they are all going to have issues or they will be struggling with the same not so nice edge details, especially again, when your object and the background colors are very similar because all of these automated tools rely on color differences or contrast. And if there's not enough of that, it's not going to be able to create good selections. While with the pen tool and the vector mask, you can always create an amazing selection. So just so we can see how this selection would end up if I create my mask, you can see the end result of subject select feature. And then we can see the end result of our vector mask. Quite a big improvement, I would say. 8. Smart filter mask feature: Last but not least, there's another masking feature that we need to talk about in Photoshop. And that is the smart filter mask. Whenever you create a smart object and you apply a filter on it, you will also get mosque for specifically for that filter. And that's what we call a smart filter mask. So in this case, the original image look like this. So there was no motion blur or anything like that. But then I went along and created a vector mask for the car, which we have inside the smart object. So we can see the vector Mazda. I've done all the work and created this nice outline. And then having it plays on top of the original background. I used on the background and motion blur, but it was created on a smart object, which means that it's non-destructive. And more importantly, the motion blur I only used in the background and the foreground. But whatever is in focus, that central part is actually masked out. So the motion blur itself is most out. If I shift click on this, I can hide it so you can see how it would look like if I didn't do that. While if I shift click again, I can show again those parts. So basically what you can do with these types of masks is to mask out effects. So same thing if I use the brush tool and start painting, black will hide the effect. Filter and white will show the filter again, as simple as that. So same exact principle, what you would use on a pixel mask, but in this case, it is used to show or hide the filter, but the shape is actually doing a really good job at showing you these three main categories of layer masks in the Properties panel. The filter mask, the pixel mask, and the vector mask. So you have the three main categories here and you can actually switch between them. And this is actually the three types of masks you can have on a layer. And the fourth one wouldn't be a clipping mask, but the actual layer mask, we call these that you can see here together. Would you ever need all of these different masks on the same layer? Well, it can easily happen. And I had previously projects where I had to combine them and I even had to use multiple layer Moscow vector masks on the same layer. And it's good to know that if you are creating a group, a layer group command G or Control G on a layer, the group itself can have more masks on it, so I can add another mask. And in that way, if a layer is within a group, you are actually adding more masks on the same layer. So it's almost like unlimited options that you have there. Actually, I think you can create up to ten subgroups, which means you still have limitations. But let's not go down that route. 9. Combination of Vector and Pixel masks: Let me show you one final example where I have a good combination of a pixel mask and a vector mask. But for this technique, I like to use two separate layers. So the same layer duplicated, one having a pixel mask, the other one having a vector mask. And this is actually the most common workflow I would use for selecting people professionally. Because the body is best to be selected V, the vector mask, because we have nice sharp edges so close, normally, jewelry even and just the skin itself normally is best to be selected with the vector mask. But the hair is much better selected with the pixel mask, because obviously we have all those fine details that you won't be able to select properly with the vector mask. So as you can see, I combine these two layers. We can see them one without the other one. But by combining them together, we get a really good like best of both worlds. Selection, pixel mask for soft edge selections, which is hair for grass, all that type of things. And then a vector mask for the hard edge selections. 10. Learn to work with Vector mask: So here we are in Photoshop and you can already see the final result that we will be working on. So I have two images. We have the telescope and I have this other background photo here. I already added a little bit of Gaussian blur on it just to make it look a bit more realistic as if these two things were in the same photo. And I also have an additional layer underneath which I'm going to use when I'm making the selection. Now the whole point of this tutorial, as I already mentioned in the intro, is to learn to work with a vector mask and to learn about path operations and pass the arrangements, essentially combining multiple paths within the same vector mask. This will help you to work really efficiently and professionally with vector masks and generally to create these crisp and sharp selections that you can see here as well. So you will never be able to get this with any of the other selection tools like magic wand, color range or subjects select because they always will have the pixelated edges while working with the vector mask and shapes, you can get this perfectly nice, crisp edges and more importantly, you can easily amend them. So if you spot some mistakes, like in this case here, I can just go into the vector mask, find that anchor point, and just nudge it up a bit to refine the edge just as quickly and easily as that. 11. Creating the first shape: So let's see how we get started with this. I'm going to select the mask deleted. So we start from scratch as the original background of this photo. And we have to first of all create a vector mask. So that is Control or Command key and clicking on the Japanese flag at the bottom of the Layers panel. So that's an empty Vector Mask here. And once you select it, then the tool which we will be starting with is the ellipse tool. And most importantly, you have to make sure it's set to path mode so you don't want to draw shapes. So pixels you want to work with the path mode, have that one selected. And let's get started with combine shapes. So this is called path operations. And that should be set to the first option, combined shapes, which means you are showing details that you are covering with the shape. So if I just draw a shape here very quickly, you can see what that means. Well, if I draw another shape on top of this, by default is also going to show details. But later on I can set that to subtract shape, meaning I can remove or hide certain parts of the image. Now I'm going to delete this by pressing Backspace or Delete. Now I'm going to select this other shape that we created. And you can see I can move it around and I can find where it needs to go. But one other thing that's quite useful to do when you work with vector masks in general, is that you want to keep seeing the original image while you're working on the outline. So the way you do this is by double-clicking on the Vector Mask thumbnail and make sure it's still selected because then you get to change the density. And that is going to give you a partial view of the original image and the master of details. So I normally like to set this to around 50 per cent, something like that. And then now we can continue working with it. I'm using the black arrow tool, the Path Selection Tool, which you find in the toolbar here, shortcut is a. And with this, you can move your shape around and align it. But if you need to transform it, you can also use the Control T or Command T shortcut for the free transform feature. And with that, you can increase the shapes, size. And if you're using a newer version of Photoshop, you might need to hold down the Shift key to drag these points around or to do transformation without keeping the original proportions, something like that. And then I press enter to accept the changes. Now another thing that you can do is to use the direct selection tool, which is the white arrow tool with which you can access individual anchor points within an object. And if I zoom closer, you can see what this does. If I select that point, I can move it up or down by using the arrow keys on the keyboard. If you hold down the Shift key together with an arrow key, you can also nudge details faster around. It's ten times faster than the normal shortcut itself. So I can just double-check here on the left side. I think that looks quite good. Maybe just drag it a little bit further. And then if you want, you can also adjust the handles direction handles, they are called. With that, you can adjust further the curvature on each side so I can align it better on all of these details here and there generally, I like to cut a little bit further into the object than the original edge, because that way I can avoid showing those colors that would reflect what was the original background. So in this case, it's going to fit better in the new image behind it. Of course, you can always use adjustment layers as well to refine that. But for now, I'm happy with this starting shape that we created. Maybe this one here on the top can be adjusted slightly as well to follow the shape that we need. 12. Combining shapes in the mask: Now let's move on by adding another ellipse. So still using the same tool. And most importantly, you want to always make sure that the vector mask is still highlighted. If by accident you don't highlight that, then the path might end up being created on top of the image and not inside the mask. So if this ever happens, you can use Control X or Command X on Mac. Then select the mask and Control or Command V to paste it in so you don't have to restart. You can just move the path from the image into the vector mask if that ever happens, as I said. But I'm just going to draw it again. Checking that the mask is selected and also checking that the path operation is set to subtract front shape. So before we used combined shapes, now we are using subtract front shape, which means it's going to hide the detail that we are covering with this shape. And there is another brilliant shortcut. While you are drawing a shape, you can hold down the spacebar to move it around while you're still drawing it. So I'm drawing it and holding down the space bar. But before I go any further, just so you can see better what I'm doing, I'm going to change the visibility of the parts. So in a recent version of Photoshop, this was introduced as a new option and you can actually change the color of the path highlight, but you can also increase the thickness of it, which I think is going to help just so we can see better what I'm doing. I'm going to delete this path and start again. So drawing it over the image and then holding down the space bar, I can reposition it. When I let the Spacebar go while still holding down the mouse, I can adjust the size, again, a little bit of adjustment with the spacebar. And then once I'm happy with the result, I can let go. And then I can see that this shape was actually used to cut out from the image because we use the second path operation once again, the subtract front shape. So now that we have that ready, we can move to another shape tool. In this case, I'm going to use the rounded rectangle tool. And with that, I'm going to draw a shape, but this time I need to again reveal details. So I switched to combine shapes operation. And this is again another thing that might happen with you that if you have currently an active path selected, changing the path operation will actually affect that selected path. And it won't prepare your next path to be created the right way. So I'm just going to undo this last step. And the way you can avoid messing up existing parts by changing path operations, just simply click outside somewhere, holding down the control key, and then click back in the Vector Mask. And that means that you select all the existing paths. And the path operation that you choose is just going to affect your next path that you are creating. So now I can draw this rectangle, rounded rectangle, and I'm going to align it to the shape they're holding down spacebar and just move it slightly to the left. I think that is a quite good position for it. Let's just have a look at it from close up. And if I want, I can go into the Properties panel and why this shape is selected, I can increase the roundness of the radius on the corners. So I can increase the amount, maybe even further. And once again, it doesn't have to be exactly the same as it was. But now that it's the right side, I can also use the direct selection tool and select individual points like let's say these points here on the left side, just use the arrow keys to nudge them further in a bit. And if that's still not enough, I can also use the pen tool P is the shortcut to select it to add an additional point here on the left side. So if I click somewhere here, then I can hold down the Control or Command key. I can drag it out. And now I created that perfect curve that follows the original edge on this shape. And we can take a look at the other side. But once again, here's another useful shortcut. If you hold down the H key and click and hold onto the image, it gives you this bird's eye view or active navigator shortcut, which you can quickly jump to another part of the image. And when you let go, it zooms back to the previously used Zoom ratio. So when you work on a big image and you constantly zoom back and forth, this is the technique that I would recommend to use to save time. So hold down page, click and hold, move to the other part, let go and he zooms back. So I could even zoom closer while I'm working. And that might help me to be even more precise. I can just select these points, may be drag them up a bit, and then we can just check here on the top as well. Maybe we can just drag them up a bit and I think that looks fine. Which is this part here a little bit further in woodwork. And then once again, having this path selected, I use the Pen tool, click somewhere in the middle, and then using the direct selection tool, I can just drag it out until I'm happy with the placement of these anchors. Yeah, I think that's going to work. And of course, when I zoom this close, I might find that the previous shape needs to be amended. So in this case, this shape here, I feel like needs to be refined. So I can just use again the anchor points, drag it out until it gets to the right position. And then I can always check the rest of the path if it works or not. 13. Adding the final shapes: The best thing about working with vector masks is that it's very easy to make a man's because everything is constructed of shapes and all of these shapes are completely resolution, independent and easily editable. So this is the only fully non-destructive selection workflow in Photoshop and that's why it's so important to learn it. And of course it works best when it comes to making selections on objects like this. So less useful for organic shapes like grass or trees with leaves on them or hair for example. But once again, with hard edges and these sharp, crisp edges, It's always best to work with a vector mask and use these techniques that we're going through. Now, I'm going to draw another big shape here. So I will select the ellipse tool and check that the mask is selected. The operation is set to reveal in this case. So the first one, which is called Combined Shapes. And I'm just going to draw quickly, hold down the Spacebar and align it there. And that looks good. Now we can come down here and I'm going to speed up a bit just so you can see the speed with which you can work when you work with these tools. I'm going to do another rectangle here at the bottom. There is another rectangle which we can create here. Now the one above it. Then switch to the ellipse tool. I'm a bit closer, draw another shape, holding down the space bar. That technique never gets old. And then draw another one on top of it. Spacebar, drag it down. Alright? And then once we get to this point, we can go back and refine. So don't ever try to get it perfect the first time. You can always go back and make a man's like here I can go into the properties, increase the radius a bit, and that already gets a better result if I need to. I can also refine this by using the free transform tool. Drag it in a bit from the right side. And I think that looks already much better. 14. Using the Pen tool to create shapes: So as I said, I'm not going to spend too much time refining this if I wanted to, I could do a very nice perfect result around the edges. But I wanted to show you that sometimes you might need to use the pen tool to create a completely independent shape like here, these shapes are so unique that I can't really find a good geometric shape to cover them bid. So I'm just going to use the pen tool, making sure once again, it's set to path mode, like the working with the shapes. And then in this case, I want to use it to subtract from this object. So I'm going to draw by clicking and dragging, I can create curves. And by the way, with the pen tool as well, holding down the space bar, you can reposition anchor points. So I could just drag it down what I needed a little bit closer. And then because I need to create a straight line here, I'm going to alter option click to remove that all panhandle and click again. And click and drag also hold down the spacebar, align it a bit further. If I need, I can always come back with the direct selection tool to move these points in place. And it's good practice to have the parts closed up. So I'm just going to close this shape here. And then using the h click and drag technique, I go to the bottom and I'm going to do the same thing here. So click and drag. I create that first section, alter option, click, Create a straight part, and then click and drag this other side, and then close this shape as well. And then if it wasn't removing from the shape, that is because these two parts were created outside of the mask. So as I said, this can happen sometimes you can select both shapes by shift clicking on them, and then Command or Control X to cut, select the mask and then couldn't command or control V to paste so it can be easily fixed. And if there is another section in the image which is very similar, we could just duplicate these parts. So from the left side, I can just use the black arrow tool, the path selection tool, and hold down the Alt key to drag them all the way here on the right side. And then we can zoom a little bit closer, just make sure that they are aligned, but they look quite good. And maybe I can just move this one down a bit. And again, because everything is editable, we can select these individual points and move them into place. Also, adjust the direction of the handles until we get it right. So zooming out, we can see now that we have pretty much covered all the details. 15. Checking if the mask work: And it's probably time to check how it looks on the other image. So I'm going to turn off this color fill layer, turn on the other image. And let's not forget that we need to change the density of our vector mask. So we can double-click on the mask thumbnail and increase the density up to 100 per cent, which means that the mask is now in full operation, so it completely hides or shows details. And that's one thing that you can't do with a vector mask. You can't have 50% visibility unless you are using the density, but you won't be able to do that on a path level vial with a pixel mask, you can always use gray values for partially showing details. So that's just one disadvantage in a way or a difference between pixel and Vector Mask. By one additional thing I wanted to show you is that if you decide to join some parts together, That's also possible here in vector mask. So all you have to do is to select the path you want to combine. I'm just going to shift click on these here in the middle. So there's five parts I selected. And if I want to combine them, I just have to come here into the path operations again and choose Merge Shaped Components. So what happened is that instead of them being separate parts, now they are combined into a single outline. So sometimes this can result in a compound path when the parts were not joined together and that still works. But essentially this created a single object which now might be easier to make changes to. But remember, if you use the merger option, you won't be able to go back to see the original parts. So it's final. And this is probably the only nondestructive method within this workflow. However, it can sometimes simplify working with a vector mask, especially when you end up working with lots of separate parts within the same vector mask. 16. Path arrangement feature: Now there's one last thing I wanted to mention and that is the path arrangement feature, which if you're not familiar with, can really mess things up and make your life difficult. So I'm going to turn off the image just so we can see clearly what's happening here. And I'm going to select this center circle or ellipse that we created to cut details out from the center part. Remember, that was the second cheap I created. So anything else that I created afterwards is on top of this, even though there is no visible stacking order like what we would normally see in the layers panel. There is still a hierarchy between the parts within a vector mask. So if I have this path selected and go into path arrangement, then choose bring shape to front. Then even though I added those other shapes to reveal details, because this big circle is now ended up being on top of everything else. It's going to take priority and it overrides the other operations underneath it. So imagine again like layers, because this was moved all the weight onto the top, it's going to be covering up everything underneath it. So the reason I'm mentioning this is that it can very easily happen with you that you add the shapes in the wrong order where you end up having issues like this that you won't be able to show or hide certain details. So what you need to do is to move the selected shape up and down. So in this case, I can choose Send shape to back and then bring shape forward one step. Because when you send something all the way to the back, that also messes things up. So you can see with these two steps, send it all the way to the bottom and bring it up one level, fixed, once again, everything. So if you are lucky and you are adding your shapes in the right order, you might never need to touch the path arrangement, but it's very important to learn about it and know how it works. So once again, it is just like the stacking order in the layers panel. Whatever is on top is going to override all the other shape corporations underneath it. And with that, now we covered everything you need to know about working efficiently and professionally with vector masks. 17. Photoshop pen tool: So the first question is whether you still need to learn to work with the pen tool in Photoshop or not? It is a good question because there's so many cool new tools like the Object Selection tool, with which you literally just have to make a selection like this and it will snap on to the object. It uses the Adobe Sensei artificial intelligence technology and identifies what you make a selection of. And if I just redo this selection and maybe stay closer to this part here, it should also again find even that edge there, which was a little bit more tricky to identify. This is obviously a great selection. And if I turn this into a mask by clicking on the little Japanese flag here on the bottom right. You can see it actually does a really good job, so it creates a good outline. However, this is still not as perfect and clear as what you would be able to create with the pen tool. If I Alt or Option click on the mask, we can see that the edge is still hazy. And as I said, it's not as clear as what you can achieve with the pen tool. So I would say the pen tool is still the best tool when it comes to making selections of objects with hard edges. But there's so much more that you can do with the Pen tool in Photoshop. So in this video, I am going to walk you through all of that. But let's first start with the settings. 18. Pen tool settings : When you select the pen tool by pressing P on the keyboard, you will get a couple of options here in the little cogwheel. The first one is the color of the path. Now when you work on images like this, the red outline is not going to help you. So I just show you if I start painting with this, you can't really see what you're doing. So in these cases, it's worth changing the color here, there's a couple of options you can choose from. The default cyan color, blue color is quite nice, but you also have the option to change the thickness. There's not that many options here, but we can switch all the way up to three pixels or 0 and the half pixels, which is going to be very thin. Another very useful option you will find here is called the rubber band. Now if you turn this off, you will be able to only see the next path segment that you are doing when you actually let the mouse school. So once you click, it will appear the same thing with occurs. If I click and drag, I will only see the appearing once I actually clicked. So when I move my cursor around, nothing is going to appear. However, if I go back and turn on the rubber band, It's now enabled, I can see the next curve segment even before placing it down. So even before defining the next anchor point. So now if I just click here, you can see the same thing happens there as well. So it gives me a preview even before committing to the next anchor point. And last but not least, there's also another very important. So I think I highly recommend to change this you will find in the preferences. So if you go there on the cursor's, you will be able to change too precise cursors for the other cursors. So this will apply to a couple of tools like the eyedropper, but more importantly to the pen tool, because by default, if you use it as a standard, you will actually see the pen tool and I don't really like that. I actually prefer this option. So if we come back and choose precise, now we just have a little crosshair which is much more subtle and it doesn't get in the way if you have the standard cursor option selected, you can also use a shortcut, the caps lock, with which you can temporarily turn on the precise mode, and you can continue drawing with that. And then when you press Caps Lock again, you go back to the default version. 19. Pen tool shortcuts : Now let's go through a couple of very useful shortcuts. I would recommend to learn these at the beginning and really practice them until they become second nature. So if I come closer here, I can show you when you first start your path, you just simply click. Then the next thing, if you want to draw it completely straight, you can just click. Or if you want to add a curve like on this side, you can click and drag to create the curve. And if you're not happy with the placement of your next anchor point, you can hold down the space bar and drag it around. I can drag it all the way here and then continue drawing it. And when I let the spacebar cool, when you create curves instead of straight lines with the pen tool, you will end up having symmetrical handle points. These can be very useful to make sure that your next curve segment is going to be continuous, like here you can see it is going to be a nice smooth transition between the previous segment and the new one. But if you want to have a completely different curve and maybe you want to define a coordinate point there. You can hold down the Alt or Option key and click on that last point. That way I can create an independent curve like this. And again, the same thing here, alt click there. I can create a new one and define that point. But then when I move further, like here, I would probably want to keep it nice and smooth. So I'm just going to click and drag to define this section. And then if I want to just refine my handle points, I can hold down the Control or Command key and drag this around until I'm happy with it's fitting. Let's just adjust that a little bit further as well. I'm going to change the color maybe to yellow. I think that's going to stand out more. And we can already see if I come back here that we managed to cover quite a lot already. So we already seen a couple of shortcuts, but there's other things you can also achieve with them. If you, again hold down the Alt or Option key and go back to any of these points and click on them. They can be turned back into a corner point. So an already existing smooth point can become a corner point and vice versa as well. So if you have a corner point like this and Alt click and drag on it, you can create a new smooth point. You can also split direction handles when you hold down Alt or Option key. Again, you can have completely independent segments that were originally connected to each other. So before splitting them, if I come back with the Command or Control key, they will move together. Once again, instead of using the Command or Control key, if you use Option or Alt key, you can split and adjust individually only one side of your smooth points. The Shift key can also be sometimes useful with which you can draw completely straight lines horizontally or vertically. So holding down the shift key will constrain to these 90 degrees angles, but it can also do 45-degree angles. So these are diagonal lines and the Command or Control key, remember, can be used to reposition any of these points at any time. But it can also be used to start a new path. So if you hold down Command, Control and click somewhere, then you don't have to switch to a different tool. You can just start drawing a completely new path. So again, command control, click, and then start drawing a new path. And if I want, I can later on connect these to each other and then it becomes a single path. And when you select the path, you can quickly delete it by pressing Backspace or Delete. And if you only want to remove an anchor point from an existing path, you have to make sure that you are in the drawing mode. So you go back and continue drawing that path and then hover over whichever anchor point you want to remove and just simply click on it. This way, I can remove this, but still keep the last anchor point here on the right. Now, for this to work, you have to make sure the auto add delete option here in the control bar is turned on. You can decide to turn this off if you don't want to accidentally remove anchor points. But when it's turned on, it can also be used to add new anchor points on the path or along the path. So simply go close. And when you see the plus sign, click will add that anchor point and it will automatically come with direction handles. So if I use again Command or Control click and drag, you can see the handles already there. So let's try this again. Here. I'm going to click and then Command Control. Drag it out. Don't forget if you want to turn these into corner points or you have to do is to hold down Alt or Option key and click on them again. Now if you want to quickly delete multiple anchor points but still preserve parts of the path. You should use the direct selection tool as the white arrow tool here. Once that's selected, just mark all those anchor points that you wish to delete and then press Backspace or Delete. Now in this case, I only want it to delete these and still keep that one which was following the outline of the trainers. And this way, I can still keep the rest of the path and only delete the unnecessary anchor points. 20. How to turn your selection into a Vector mask: So now that you've seen how I use the pen tool, let me speed things up a bit and I'm going to make a selection of this trainer and then we will see how it can be turned into a vector mask. Okay, so now that we have the whole path, we can turn this into a vector mask. And the quickest way of doing it is by making sure first that you have the right layer selected and now holding down the Command or Control key and clicking on the mask icon here at the bottom. Then you should be able to see your selection. And you will see the mask icon appearing here in the Layers panel. And if you hold down shift key when clicking on this thumbnail, you can disable temporarily the mask or turning it back on. Let me just change the background colors so we can see both the outline of the mask and the background. So when we zoom closer, you can see how nice and sharp these edges are. But notice that there's a couple of mistakes like here, it's not perfect. Now this is another reason why I love working with vector masks and the Pen tool, because I can come back to the mask itself and use the direct selection tool, the white arrow with WeChat can come closer and make the changes to the selection. Now in these cases, I prefer to keep the thickness as low as possible. So 0.5 pixels zoom really close and then make the adjustments. So now I can come here and adjust the handle, refine that edge, and then do the same thing here. I can drag this down and move it closer, something like that. And then also this one can come down a bit, and so on and so forth. You can even use the arrow keys on the keyboard to push these points around. And you can even select multiple anchor points, like in this case, let's say select these three. And then I can use up and down left and right arrows to move it around at the same time, that can save you a lot of time as well. Now if you don't want to end up carving into the object and taking away too much from it. You can also use an additional layer. So I'll just create a new layer on top of this and create a clipping mask by clicking between the two, holding down Alt or Option key. And then on this new layer, you can sample a color from the detail close to the edge that you would like to refine. So I'm going to hold down Alt or Option key by using the brush tool. Click somewhere here, and then maybe just increase the brush size and change the hardness to 0 per cent. So it will become a very soft brush and then just simply paint over the edges here. Now, this is going to completely overwrite the details. So you are losing some of the texture there. But if you change the blend mode of this layer to color, then it's not going to remove the texture is just simply going to remove those colors, red color or tint, in this case, that was originally from the background. So if I do this quickly, you can see now before and after, you don't always have to do this coloring of course, because most of the time you can just go back to your mosque, the path that you have in the Vector Mask. And then using the direct selection tool, like I've done before, I can use either the shortcuts or just simply adjust these parts and curves until they get in the right place. So the Pen tool and the vector mask together is still the best method for creating selections non-destructively on objects, especially when it comes to hard edges. 21. Pen tool, Curvature tool: Now when objects have a lot of curves on them, you might want to consider trying the curvature tool. So here we have another image. I'm going to zoom a little bit closer. And instead of using the pen tool, now I'm going to switch to the Curvature Pen tool. So this is like an alternative for the pen tool. And with this, instead of clicking and dragging, whenever you click, it will automatically create curves. So that's quite useful, especially when it comes to these curvy objects. So let me just start this, zoom a little bit closer and start from here. If I just simply click there, then the next point I define here, then the next point there, you see it actually does a really good job. You still have to have a sense of where you should place down the anchor points. But that's something that you will get used to quite quickly. And if I come down further here and create a straight line, and then another point maybe somewhere around here. Then I can go further and get all the way to this point here. Now, when I zoom out, you can see it actually did a really good job. But if I want to refine details here, all I have to do is to hold down the Control or Command key and move these anchor points around. I don't even have to deal with the direction handles in this case, I can just move these points around easily. And of course I can always come back and add additional points if I feel like I didn't fit the path perfectly, like here, again, I can play around with this point and then maybe just add an additional point here just to make the path fit much better. If you double-click on an existing anchor point, it will turn it into a sharp corner. And when you double-click again, it turns it back into a smooth point. So like here I can double-click, that creates a sharp corner. And then I can just click and drag this down to fit it onto the object. Honestly, I highly recommend to use the curvature tool when you have objects like this where almost everything is curvy and there are hardly any straight lines. If you're still not convinced about the curvature tool. Let me show you one last thing. I'm just going to continue this part here. You can see it's a very bad fit at the moment. But if I hold down the Command or Control key, instead of clicking on an anchor point, I can just drag the path itself. So that way I can fit it onto the shape that I need without messing around with the direction handles or the anchor points. Now of course, you can always start using the curvature tool and then halfway through you can switch to the pen tool and vice versa so they can be combined. And for this, it's worth changing their shortcut. So I would normally have Shift P assigned to the Freeform Pen tool. And that way I can very quickly switch and work with the two tools at the same time. 22. Pen tool, Symmetry: Now since we drew half of this selection and because it is a symmetrical object, we will be able to create the symmetry by simply just duplicating this path. This is also a big time-saver when it comes to these symmetrical objects. So all you have to do is to use the path selection tool and holding down Alt or Option key, you can make a duplicate very quickly, just simply drag it. Then use the free transform tool Control or Command T. And go to the w value here in the control bar and put a minus before the value inside that block and then press Enter. And you might need to press it twice to make sure it's accepted. Now, we very quickly flipped these details around. And I can move it close here on the right side. And if I zoom closer, I can align it to it using the arrows on the keyboard. And then if I want to join these two pieces together, I can use the pen tool once again, maybe this time just simply clicking here and there, and then I can refine them further, but now a single path. Now of course, when it comes to having lots of anchor points next to each other, it's a good idea to remove some and simplify your path because less anchor points usually, the easier it is to make changes. I'm just going to use Command key and adjust this curve here on the top. 23. Pen tool, Combine paths: Now it's also important to learn how to combine multiple parts together into a single vector mask. So as you can see here, I already created the mask for the outline. So the silhouette is there, but we still need to get rid of these hollow details. So let's just start here on the top. One I'm going to do is to select the mask. Then I press P on the keyboard to get the pen tool. And here on the top, I'm going to switch to subtract front shape. This is a different drawing mode. You just have to make sure you don't accidentally have the original path selected. Just simply have the Mosque itself selected but not the path. Because otherwise this path operation change is going to affect the visibility of details. But if I now come here and I'm going to just draw these sections, I can already see the changes that I'm doing as I'm going over it. So I can just quickly close it up and then maybe just refine a few points until it gets in the right place. So once again, I will just draw another one here, just so you can see that we can have as many parts as we want within the same vector mask. So let me just put that up there and come down. I'm not going to be too precise here. I just want to quickly cut that detail out. And essentially this is all you would have to do. But the best thing is that whenever you come back to the Vector Mask, you can individually refine these parts. So they are all combined into the same mask, but you can access them separately and you can even change their path operation at anytime. In Illustrator, we would normally cause something like this as a compound path. 24. Pen tool other uses: So far we've seen examples of the Pen tool use for making selections and extracting details from that background. But it can also be used for so many other things. So let me just give you an example. If I want to add shading, for example, on a certain detail, I can use the pen tool to make that edge that I require. So in this case, maybe I want to add some shading here at the bottom. So I'm going to just select this detail. And since I already have the outline, I don t have to do the whole silhouette. We're just close it in like this and then turn this path into a selection quickly by pressing Command or Control Enter. Then on a new layer, which is again going to be clipped onto this original image. I am going to use a larger brush and maybe a darker red colors, something like that with which I can start painting over here around the edge. And I can create that shading if it's too much, I can always reduce the opacity, set it up to whatever I prefer. And if I want to keep using this selection, I can just quickly turn it into a mask by clicking on the mask icon here. So whenever I want to come back, I can just select the layer thumbnail and continue painting within those boundaries that I created. And of course, there's so much more you can do with the Pen tool. You can draw lines, you can draw shapes, even dashed lines, which I'm just going to show you quickly. Again using pen tool. For this, I'm going to switch to shape and I will just use a stroke, maybe set this to red, and then change here in the stroke options two dashed or dotted line. You can decide which one you prefer and you can of course, even make additional changes if you go into the more options. But I'm just going to stick to this default setting. And then if I draw something, you will see it is actually a dashed line, which could be a perfect way to add additional stitching details on this trainer, for example. And just like path saved into a vector mask, the good thing about using the pen tool with shapes is that you can always come back, make adjustments, and use all the previous shortcuts that we've learned about. So everything is completely non-destructive and that's the way you should always aim to work in Photoshop. 25. Illustrator- Clipping mask: Alright, so here we are in Illustrator and I'm going to walk you through a couple of interesting examples. But first of all, I want to make sure that you understand the basic difference between a clipping mask and then opacity mask. So on the left side I have this artwork which I created in a previous tutorial. And I have a rectangle on top of it. So this rectangle is just empty, so there's no fill color, That's just a simple stroke color on it. And all I have to do to turn this into a clipping mask is to select it together with the artwork behind it. And it's important that the rectangle needs to be on top. Once they are selected, I can turn it into a clipping mask by pressing Command or Control seven. Or you can go to the Object menu and choose Clipping Mask Make from there. Now, once you've created a clipping mask, the easiest thing to do is to check what happened actually on the layers panel. So in this case, I'm just going to jump down here. But as you can see, we have the clip group and within that we have the rectangle, the name of the object that turns into a clipping mask in the layers panel gets an underline. So it's always a visual indication that helps you to quickly find, which is the actual clipping mask and whatever is going to be placed inside this group will automatically be also masked by this object. So just to show that to you, if I move this shape here, you can see that it's not affected by the mosque yet. But once I drag it into the clip group, immediately, it's going to be affected. And of course the same way I move it inside the group, I can also move it out. So I just drag it out of the group and then move it back here in the middle. So in the group within which you have a clipping mask, any other objects you replace, n will be automatically affected by the mosque. And in this case, because we created a rectangle or use the rectangle as our clipping mask, it's going to use that shape. Whatever falls into that shape will be visible. So if I want to move this around independently from the art work, I would need to come to the layers panel and click on the little circle next to the rectangle. This way, if I start moving this around, notice that the actual artwork, the badge inside this mask, is not moving around, only the mask itself with which we can reveal parts of the badge. Now of course, I can resize this rectangular as well, so I can move it around, resize it, show maybe just the top part of the bench. I can even rotate the mask around and so on and so forth. If I want to quickly switch to the artwork inside the mask, I can use this icon here on the top, which says edit contents. Once I click on that, I can move the artwork around or make changes to it. And in this case, when I click away, you can see that the mosque was staying in place and the artwork was moving inside the mask. So by default, when you click on a clipping group, We'll move both the mask and the artwork together. But the techniques I just showed you, you can access individually, just the mosque or just the artwork inside it. Once you don't need a clipping mask anymore, you can use again a shortcut to get rid of it. It's called release the feature itself. It's Command Option seven or control or seven. And what happens is that you get back your rectangle. So we can select the rectangle separately, and I can just press D so we can see again with its original colors. And if we don't need it anymore, we can even delete it by pressing Backspace. I'm just going to put it back here on the left so we can see how it works. 26. Illustrator - Draw inside: Before we move on to the opacity mask, I wanted to show you another feature called draw inside. And the reason for that is because it actually works with a clipping mask or it creates a clipping mask automatically. So in this case, instead of creating a separate shape, if you have a shape already within which you would like to add elements, then you can use this feature called draw inside. So it's almost like the other way around. So using the shape or the container first. So creating that first and then create the artwork that will go inside it. So having the container selected, in this case, this blob, I can press shift D on the keyboard twice until I see these little dashed lines in the corners of the selection. Or you can also go to the toolbar and choose draw inside there. So once you have that, you can even click away. Doesn't really matter what you're doing it from this point on, because you are restricted to work inside that selected object. So for example, if I select the pencil tool and I'm just going to choose maybe no fill color. But I'm going to use, let's say this orange stroke color. And I'm going to start drawing. You will see that the drawing will only appear inside the selected shape. No matter what I'm doing outside of it, that's not going to be visible as simple as that. Now, again, these shapes are created within a clipping group. So if we check our layers panel again, we will find a clipping group and the original shape that was here turned into a clipping mask. Now what is the underlying? And the reason I showed this is because some users prefer to work this way, but also worth remembering that you are clipping paths don't have to be transparent. They can have colors on them. So if I come back to the original example here on the left, which we have a clipping mask, which is a rectangle. If I switch the fill color on this to something else, let's say something like that or that you can see it can serve two different purposes. One is to do the clipping and the other one to provide a background color or background gradient event, which we can see here on the other example. I'm just going to undo this. And now we can move on to the third option, the opacity mask. But first I'm just going to make sure I get out of the draw inside mode by pressing shift the again. So now we are back to drawing normally, just double checking here in the toolbar. So it says draw normal. 27. Illustrator - Opacity mask: The opacity mask is something that is very similar to a layer mask in Photoshop, where the Shades of Grey is used to hide and show details of a selected object or group. So black hides and white shows that's the basic principle. You have to remember. Notice that I placed here a rectangle on top of the bench, which is a gradient the way it has a gradient on it. So on the top it's white, on the bottom is black. Now if I will apply this as a mosque, you can already think about what's going to happen because we have white on the top, those parts will be visible as we move along down, we will have less and less details visible from the batch. So let's just try this out. I'm going to select these two together, so the rectangle and the batch behind it. And then to be able to create an opacity mask. The best thing to do is to use the transparency panel. Within that, you will find the Make Mask option. Once you click on that, again, the topmost object will automatically be turned into a mosque, in this case, an opacity mask. And similarly again to Photoshop, you can keep track of what you have on the selected object or what opacity mask is applied on the selected object. Checking your transparency panel. Here. On the left you see the artwork, and on the right you see the mask itself. Now, let me show you a couple of shortcuts. First of all, if you just simply click on the mask, as you can see, I just clicked on it in the layers panel, you will be able to see the change. So now we are only accessing the Mosque itself. So we don't even see whatever is in the artwork. And it's important to remember to switch back to the artwork. Otherwise you won't be able to work with anything else. It's almost like a special type of isolation mode in Illustrator. If I want to go back and make changes to my artwork, I just have to remember to click back on this thumbnail here in the transparency panel. So once I'm there, I should be able to see all my layers again. Another way you can tell that you are stuck in an opacity mask is by checking your tab. So here in the document habits also says that we add within an opacity mask currently when I'm teaching in the classroom, this is one of the first thing that I check. If someone is stuck, most likely they are stuck in an opacity mask and that's why something is not working. So keep an eye on that once you start using opacity masks. But there's a couple of other things that you can do. First of all, if you shift click on the opacity mask thumbnail, you can hide it. So temporarily disable it and see the full object again. This is without deleting the opacity mask, just simply shift click on the thumbnail can show or hide the original artwork without the mask. And the other shortcut is Alt or Option. Click on it. We'll be able to show you what's inside the mask. So actually seeing the object that's inside the mask. So this I would call the mask view. And the cool thing is that the same shortcuts are available in Photoshop. So if you learn them here, you will be able to use them in Photoshop as well whenever you work with pixel masks. But if you want to learn more about that, make sure you check out the video In this mini series when I'm going to cover everything about Photoshop masks, the links will be in the description once it comes out. So Alt click again to switch back. I want to show you another feature. It's called clipping or clip. Now this can get confusing because clipping mask, we already discussed the thing on the left that we went through. But when you use clip within an opacity mask or in the transparency panel, that means slightly, something slightly different. So if I switch off the clip, notice what happens here. So instead of only showing details within the shape that we used as our opacity mask. The rest of the object will be not affected, so it will stay visible as normal. While if we turn back the clip option, which is the default feature, then only details within the opacity mask shape will be visible. Luckily, it is very simple to switch it back and forth so you can experiment with it and see which one works best for the artwork that you are using it on. I'm going to just turn it off. And now, because this is a rectangle, when I'm starting to resize it, we can see how it's going to affect the object. So we have a gradient on it. Don't forget if I drag it all the way up, we can get a very nice fade, more smoother transition from being visible to the hidden parts at the bottom. And because we are using a gradient on it, we can even press G on the keyboard to access the gradient annotator. This is only going to be visible if you are on the right swatch. So you have to make sure you add on the field swatch in these cases. And then you can drag it up and down, even the endpoints. So not necessarily the actual shape, but you can really nicely control where you want the endpoint to be. So where do you want it to be completely disappear. I can move the white point down as well, and then we can create a more abrupt transition or software and so on and so forth. And of course, we can also increase the width of this shape. So then we can affect the whole object. Now, you can see that the main difference between an opacity mask and the clipping mask is the ability to have these smooth transitions. With a clipping mask, you will always have those hard edges between the visible and the hidden parts. 28. Illustrator - Pattern: So now that we went through the basics of using masks in Illustrator, let me show you a couple of cool examples. So first of all, we have a cold character illustration. And what I would like to achieve is to place this artwork inside the head dress. So it should be like a pattern in the dress. Now, the dress is going to be our clipping mask. So I'm going to move the pattern, let's say roughly around here. And I already have the dress on top. So the, the girl is standing in front of the pattern. And I can select the dress and then shift click on the pattern. And all I have to do is to press Command or Control seven to create the clipping mask. But normally or by default, the clipping mask loses its original color. So we have to go into the clip, group, select the clipping path, and then pick a color for it. Let's say this one here. Okay, so now that we have the mask ready, we can select the artwork. Again, move it around, and I can even turn off the bounding box and the edges. If I hide the edges, we can see better what we're doing. So I can do rotation. I can use shortcuts the arrow keys on the keyboard and move it around. So you can see why masking is so cool and so important in illustration, because you can just do so many different effects and completely non-destructively. So we can always see the whole pattern again. We can move it around, we can change the color, and so on and so forth. 29. Illustrator - Reflection: So here's another nice example. In this case, we are going to create a reflection for this abstract logo shape. All I'm going to do first of all is to duplicate it, but by using the reflect tool, if you select the object and then press O on the keyboard, That's going to give you the reflect tool. Then just click on the tip of the object or wherever you want the reflection to appear. Start dragging the object itself and hold down Option or Alt Shift together. Make sure you let the mouse go first, then the shortcuts, this is going to create a duplicate while using the reflect tool. And now all we have to do is to draw a rectangle on top of this. So let's say something around here. And it's automatically turned into a gradient because that was the most recent swatch that I use. But I'm going to use the gradient annotator soon on this to adjust the gradient. First of all, I'm going to select the gradient rectangle and the reflection object together and then click on Make mask in the transparency panel. So as you can see, that works the same way we've done it in the previous example. And if I want to make changes to it, I'm just going to click on the opacity mask. And then I can use the gradient annotator by pressing G, I can adjust where I want the gradient to be visible. Now normally I would turn off the clip option and I would actually make the rectangle big enough to cover completely the object. Or if you want to keep it within the art board, you can also align it to that and just turn back the clip option, whichever you prefer. Now, if I go back and use the gradient annotator, I can still adjust it so I can drag it from the bottom up or from the top-down and so on and so forth. So that created a nice reflection effect. And of course, we can still reduce the overall opacity of this shape as well. So if we feel like it's a little bit too strong, together with the opacity mask, we can also reduce the overall opacity. 30. Illustrator - Masking Combination: Here's a fun example when I'm going to use both a clipping mask and then opacity mask. Now first of all, I want this ribbon to be clipped onto the head of our ninja. For this to work, we have to select both of them together, but I'm going to make sure the head shape is on top of the ribbon. Because remember the topmost object is the one that defines the outline. So now I can select them together and press Command or Control seven. And then I can go back inside the clipping group, select the object and just set it back to black. That was the part where we created the clipping mask. Now, let me turn on a couple of additional layers here. So we have these layers and I also prepared another shape here, which is going to be my opacity mask. So instead of having all of these lines just going crazy in the background, I'm going to turn them down with this nice radial mask. So now I can select these two together. So the group of the bursts of light and the radial mask on top of it. And I go into the transparency panel, click on Make Mask. And there you go. A beautiful effect. Instead of that really harsh, strong background that we had before. Of course, whenever you use a radial gradient in an opacity mask, you will still have the control to go back and use the gradient annotator. So you can see I can increase how much I want to see from it and also how much I would like to hide. So really cool way of making changes to your illustrations and hide and show certain details. 31. Illustrator - Global mask: And last but not least, let me show you another very cool technique which not many people know. I think this is something also took me quite a long time to figure out. Sometimes in illustrations you would have several layers with lots of different things going on it like here we have the snow, we have people, we have the clouds, so on and so forth. So the problem is, if I want this to be a nice, tidy edge, which currently it is not, then I would need to create a clipping mask for it. Instead of deleting things, I would just like to hide everything else outside of the art board. Now, there's no quick way of saying clip illustration to the art board, although that will be a really cool feature, hopefully illustrate the developers are watching this video if you like that idea, let me know in the comments section, but I will show you something quite similar to that. And it's my work around this issue. What I normally do if I wanted to create a global mask for my whole document or the whole illustration, I would create nonlinear separate layer. I can even call it a mask like that. Then I create a rectangle. In this case, I'm just going to create the rectangle a little bit further in inside the art board, something like that. And then here in the layers panel, having that rectangle selected, we can go into the drop-down menu or the panel menu it's called. And then we can choose Make Clipping Mask. Now, only do this if you have nothing else on that layer. Otherwise it just messes things up. But when you use it like this, it's going to turn that shape, whatever was selected into a clipping mask without having anything around it. Currently, it doesn't seem like we've made a difference, but now comes the cool part. I'm going to now select all of my layers. Click on the top, Shift-click on the bottom one, and then look at this. If I drag this to the point where my mask is until I can see the little blue line appearing there. If I let go now, all of my original layers will turn into groups inside that new mask layer. And also at the same time, now the mosque is activated and it applies itself to everything. In my illustration. This is something that we covered in our 365 days of creativity, but I thought I include it in this video as well. And I go into a little bit more depth on it to make sure that you know how to use this feature. Let me give you one final bonus tip. If you use a rectangle for masking and it's already turned into a clipping mask. You can just select it and drag this little corner widgets to set the radius on it. And then you can have nice rounded rectangles as masks. And not only that, you can even hold down the Alt or Option key and click on these little coordinate widgets to change the corner effect. So you can get these three types of corner effects. And it's just going to revolve and go back and forth through these three options. 32. Masking a frame in InDesign: When someone mentions masking, InDesign is not the tool that you would first think of, is more Photoshop and Illustrator. But actually in InDesign, there's also quite a lot of masking techniques you can do, even just simply by working with frames, which is the most common thing you would do in InDesign is innovate a masking technique. So let me walk you through all of these things that you can do to show and hide details and to work with these techniques in a creative way in Adobe InDesign. First of all, when you work with frames, you need to remember that the frame is your container. The image inside it is the content. And they work together, but also independently in a way. So you can see here on the right side, I have my frame and inside it the image. And I can drag any of the sides into crop the image. So let's say if I want to crop it closer to the flower, it will look like that. And then using the Content Grabber in the middle, I can drag the image around within this crop if I wanted to move it around. So you can see why I'm referring to the frame itself as a mask because it is showing and hiding certain parts of the image. Now of course, you can use different shapes in InDesign to create your frames. Even if you have a frame that's already rectangular, like this one here, you can use the frame tools, like the ellipse frame tool and draw a circle. If you hold down the shift key will be a perfect circle or an ellipse if you want. Once you have that ready, you can just select the image itself, Command or Control X to cut it out and then selecting your frame, you just have to use Command Option V or Control V to paste into that shape. So this is still the same principle here we have again the content grabber tool. We can move the image around within that frame and even resize if we want it to. So nothing really different apart from the shape, of course, of the frame. And of course you have also the polygon frame tool, which works exactly the same way. Now if you click with that tool, what's worth mentioning is that you can type in the amount of sides and you can even create star inset. So basically instead of a normal polygon, you can have a star. So for example, a five sides star. If I just type in 50%, we will get a perfect star shape, which again will act as our frame. To be honest, I very rarely or even never used a star-shaped frame in InDesign, but it's still worth mentioning and maybe in one of your projects you will find this useful. 33. Masking multiple frames in InDesign: Let me show you a cool technique. If you use the frame towards the normal rectangle frame tool, you can do another technique with this as well. And just so you can see what I'm doing here, I am going to create a separate layer and start drawing my frame. So you can see if I press the right arrow on the keyboard, I can separate my frame, or it's called Griddify, meaning creating a grid of frames. I can use the up arrow or so to divide it into rows. Let's just create maybe something around that much at seven by four frames at this point. And I'm just going to let go here. So what happened here is that we have a lot of separate frames or a grid of frames. And what we can do is to cut the image out from the background just like before I select it and then press Command X or Control X. Now I can select all of these other frames from the Object menu. I'm going to choose paths, make compound path. It's Command or Control eight. The shortcut for it. This is actually the same shortcut in Illustrator as well, so it's worth learning it for both applications. While you will see is that once you create it, that all of these rectangles are now joined. So even though they are still independent rectangles, which I can select with the direct selection tool and I can move it around. It's still going to be handled as one compound path. And the cool thing about that is if I select all of them together, so just click on it now because it's one entity, I can use the shortcut Command Option V or Control Alt V, which is the paste into feature. And you will see that the image will be now placed into this grid of frames. So that is a really cool option. And by the way, the paste into feature is from the Edit menu. You can find it there as well. As I said before, if I select one of these squares, I can move it around, even delete one of them if I want to have an empty space for text, in this case, it would look really cool in a brochure. So you can experiment with this feature and see what you can come up with. But let me show you with the same image, another version, if I use the Rectangle Tool, Rectangle Frame Tool and I just draw maybe a frame here. I'm going to draw another frame around here, and maybe another frame there. It could even be more like portray frame. And then maybe less just have these overlapping as well, something like that. And I'm just going to rotate them slightly as well. Why not? Just add a bit more interest on it like that or so Let's rotate this that way. Now, I'm going to select all of these three frames. So currently they are just empty, empty frames. And I create an object styling this document which I'm going to apply to them, it's a simple white stroke with a bit of drop shadow on them. So that's how they look. And even like this, it looks interesting. But what we've done previously is to cut the image out, select one of these frames and use the shortcut paste into and then repeated for these other images or other frames. And now we have again, a very creative version of the same original composition. So in a way, I use these frames to highlight the most interesting details of the image. And that is still just playing with the rectangular frame tool. We haven't even used any more advanced techniques. 34. Masking cutout in InDesign: Once again, a lot of people wouldn't even think of using tools like the pen tool or the pencil and the smooth tools in InDesign, but they are actually there and they work almost exactly the same way as in Illustrator. Indesign inherited these tools from Illustrator because InDesign is actually the youngest one out of the three main graphic design tools. So Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign. This is the one that learned quite a lot from the other two applications, but mainly from Illustrator. So let's just say I would like to create a cutout effect. I could use the Pen tool, of course, for that. I'm just going to draw around this lady. Let's just create an interesting frame here. So it's like a fashion cutout. When you use scissors and you just cut out an image from its background, that's basically the effect like that. And that isn't already a frame. So I can now select the image and paste into here with the same shortcut. Similarly to before, we could also add our object style on it, and then we have a cool cutout effect. Now similarly to this, if I just copy the image and paste it in again, Let's just put it here on the side, the one that we created with the pen tool. I'm just going to keep that there. But on this other one I'm going to use now instead the pencil tool. And with this one, I can draw around it. Again, I'm not trying to create a perfect selection, but this is going to be a little bit more organic, less sharp, and edgy selection. Here at the bottom. Let's just close it off, something like that. I'm going to try to close it. But to be honest, the easiest way to close it would be to go to the Object menu paths and then close path. And that closed the end point for it. Now, once again, we could paste it in here, got the image, paste it in, and then use again the same frame style on it. So the pencil tool is more rounded compared to the pen tool. But if you want it to refine edges on either of these versions, you can also use the Smooth tool with which you can draw over the edges that you created and just smooth them out. Basically have a smoother transition on these sharp corners. So just like in Illustrator, you can use this tool. And if you double-click on the smooth tool in the toolbar, you get additional options like Fidelity and smoothness. 35. Masking outlines in InDesign: Let's move on to the next feature, which is using typography as your frame or turn text into the frame itself. Now this is very similar to using clipping masks in Photoshop. But in InDesign, you actually need to outline your tax so you won't be able to keep it editable. If you want to have an image inside a word or a sentence or a single character. Here I have this text still editable and I current, it's likely to have the e and the a joined up together. You will see why, because I actually have an interesting detail there in the photo behind it. But first of all, as I said, we need to outline this. The shortcut for that is Command Shift or Control Shift O. But you can also go to the Type menu and choose Create Outlines. Once you've done that, your text is now made up of pods. So each character is turned into an individual path, but it is actually held together as a compound path. So if I go to the Object menu and under the path options you can see it would say release compound path. You can actually separate them into individual shapes. But by default, when you use the outline option, we'll create a compound path, which means that if I copy this image or cut it out and paste into this selection, it would immediately place it into all of those characters at the same time. So now this word is our custom frame. And again, if I hover over it, I can use the Content Grabber to move the image around within the text. So you can see why I wanted to keep this part here visible and it's actually quite cool the way the two letters are joined together, almost forming like a ligature. 36. Masking, Feather in InDesign: Another thing you can do in InDesign and that is feathering. Feathering is again something that's available in Photoshop, but here in InDesign, you actually have a little bit more options with it. First of all, a tool that I really like is called gradient feather tool is something you can use when you select an image. And let's say you just wanted to fade out one part of it, the one side of it, you can click and drag and it's going to fade out the other side of the image. So if you want to keep, let's say the right side visible, you just have to do it from that side. If you do it in a shorter line than the transition itself will be shorter. You can do it diagonally and you can also do it vertically if you want, and so on and so forth. So this is called the gradient feather. And with the tool, it's very quick and easy to set up. But there's other two feathering options as well, which you can find from the FX drop-down. So if you go here you can see gradient feather is already on. If you want it to be a bit more specific, you can also change it here. So for example, even instead of linear, you can use a radial gradients and you can reverse it as well. But let's just see what else we have here. We have directional feather. It's important that you have to make sure you click on the word as well. So whichever effect you are using, make sure you click on it, not just the tick. Otherwise you won't see the options on the right. So once this is selected and the Preview option is on at the bottom, you will be able to see how this works. Basically, the directional feather is a similar feature to gradient feather, but in this case, you can control which side of your frame should be feathered out. And you can control them independently of each other. Or if you click on the little chain here, it will apply the same amount of feathering on all sides. And last but not least, we also have basic feather, which is just a global feathering around all the edges. So this is probably the most straightforward one from all of them. Now you can of course, still play around with these other values like noise, which can be interesting. Or you can also use a choke defining again the transition, the length of the transition in a way. And of course, you can also combine multiple feathering if you ever want to do that. And these effects I will mainly use to go styled images and to have them push back in the background to be able to put some text over it or stuff like that. Of course, you can combine it with reduced opacity as well. So you can soften up the edges and then you can soften the image itself as well. That makes it much easier to use it as a background element if you ever need that, maybe on a brochure. 37. Detect edges feature in InDesign: But now that you know how to use feathering, let's move on to something more exciting and it's called detect edges. Now I have an image here and I'm just going to move it over the text so you can see that it has a white background. It's an isolated photograph, so obviously it's been prepared like this, but it's a simple JPEG file, so there is no selections or masks prepared for it. But what I'm going to do is to go to the Object menu and choose clipping path. From there, choose options. And if I switch to detect edges, you will see what it can do. It automatically creates a selection for us. Again, it tries to identify the high contrast details. And based on that, it's going to create the selection using a path. Now there's a couple of additional options here. You can increase the threshold or decrease the threshold. In this case, decreased threshold is probably better because you can see there were a few details that were lost. If I had a higher threshold because it's a completely white background, I could go down really low with the threshold and I could further refine it if I wanted to by clicking Okay, and just use the direct selection tool to move any of these points around. So if I come a little bit closer, I can select, let's say, one of these points here and either delete them or move them around so I can move them up. And then let's just grab this point here, drag it down. So similarly how you would work with vector mask in Photoshop, you can do exactly the same thing here. Within InDesign. I wouldn't recommend to spend too much time on parts in InDesign because photoshop can actually do probably a better job. But still, when we move this over here, you can see it's actually quite nice. Now the only problem is that I still feel like there's a bit of the original white details showing up around the edges. So for this, if we go back to the clipping path options, we can increase this feature called inset frame. When I increase that up and click Okay, click away. You can see the white gaps are gone. Now, there are still a couple of things that we would need to refine, but it's better to do these type of things in Photoshop, although in design can do it for you. You want to do it quickly without leaving InDesign, it's perfectly fine, but you can do this better if you use vector and pixel masks in Photoshop, but detect edges feature is actually something you can use also for text wrap. So not only for cutting out and image from its original background, but also for Texts wrap. Now that's still something you apply onto your image. And this feature you can find from the window menu, text wrap panel. And within there, you can choose this third option, which is the wrap around object shape. And within here, you will find that detect edges option. But in case you already use detect edges for your clipping, you can just leave it as same as clipping. So you wouldn't have to choose the type of edges. Again, it's just worth mentioning that it is the same feature that can be applied either for a selection or for text wrap. So if I have this option on here and maybe just increase the offset, you will see exactly what it does. It creates an outline based on that path on this image. And it makes sure that when you move this image closer to tax, the tax will be pushed at the outline. We will make sure that the text wraps around the image. So if you already use detect edges to create a clipping path in InDesign for an image, you should also make use of it for a bit of texts read, but of course, don't overdo it because these effects can make it difficult to read your copy. Just a useful point here. If you do this feature, it's best to use it with justify text because if it's not justified, so let's just say I left align it, then both left and right side is going to be really messy. While when I go back to justify texts, at least the right side is completely straight. 38. Combine the features of Photoshop and InDesign: And finally, here's a few examples where we can combine the features of Photoshop and InDesign. So first of all, on the left side, I have an image which has a pixel mask saved in it. It's actually saved as a channel. So if I Alt or Option double-click on this image, it will open up in Photoshop and I can show you exactly what I created here. There is an alpha channel saved, so it was selection that I saved as an Alpha channel. So it can also be something that you save as a pixel mask. But in this case, it's saved here into the channels. And if I come here into InDesign and go to the object clipping path options. This is something I will be able to utilize by choosing Alpha channel, as simple as that. And then of course I have to make sure I choose also the channel which I call the girl. So I click on that and then click Okay, so we have a really nice selection created from the Alpha channel. Or if you have an image which was saved way that path InDesign will also be able to use that. So I go through again clipping path options and then choose Photoshop path. This time, there's the camera which it found automatically that wasn't on the only path saved. And I can click Okay, and we can see, it looks great. This was actually a path that we created in the Photoshop masking tutorial. If you haven't seen it already, make sure you check it out. It really covers a lot. The link is in the description below. So both of these examples here you can see in that tutorial, I go through step-by-step how I created them. So my preference when I work with images in InDesign and I want to cut them out is to save a path into them. So similarly to a vector mask, these are actually save as a path. So again, I can show you how this looks. There's no layer mask or anything like that. But the same thing that we've done in that other video, that path or outline is saved as a path and that just simply call it camera. If you use the pen tool and you draw your path, you just have to make sure you double-click on the name and name it and save it like that. The cool thing is that you can even store pods in JPEG files, so you don't even have to have a PSD file. You can have a smaller file size image, but it's still can hold parts, even multiple paths. If you need, you can store in one single JPEG. 39. Masking, Out of bounds in InDesign: But here's one last example where I wanted to create something a bit more complicated. And I created both a vector mask and the pixel mask in Photoshop. So I can just show you how this looks again, if I Option double-click here, we will see that for this image, if I turn off the photo layer, I needed the pixel mask for the hair and the vector mask for the body. So again, hard edges and soft edges. Again, if you're not familiar with these techniques, checkout my Photoshop masking video, which is part of this mini-series. So that's how I created it in one layer, having those two masks, creating the cutout. And then I have also the original full image underneath. So you will see why I created this way and I even named my layers. So the one at the bottom, let's call it photo, and the one on the top is called Mars. So as simple as that. But if we come back here into InDesign, the reason why I've done it this way is because I can select one of them, right-click and choose Object layer options. Or you can also find this from the Object menu if you want. Within that, you can choose which layers you want to show. So if I turn off the photo layer, then obviously we will see the mast out version. I can then click Okay. And now I can align these two images to each other. So I can drag this over to the other one. And let's just put both of them here in the middle. Now, why did I do this? What was the point of creating the mask if I then put them on top of each other, well, what I can do now is to select the full image version. And if I drag the top edge down maybe to somewhere around here, then we can create these cool out-of-bounds effects. Of course, we can decide how much of the original image we want to see. We can even click on the little yellow square on the right and drag these points in to create more like a rounded shape or even use a round shape there instead of the rectangle. So just to combine a little bit the techniques that we had, I'm going to undo these changes and use the ellipse frame tool and draw an ellipse. Let's just say something like that. And then I just cut this out, select that circular or elliptical frame and paste into. There you go. We have a very nice out-of-bounds effect. 40. Class Project: These type of compositions, I like to create my own typefaces or at least my own custom letters, for which I'm using DOB Illustrator on the iPad. You can see I'm just drawing this very quickly, and once it's ready, I can use this as a structure reference on the DOB Fire Fi website. I'm using Fire Fi Image model three with the same prom that we used before in Adob Express. So most covered bark wo I only added the white background part here. And then under the structure reference section, I'm going to upload the image with the organic character that I just drew on the iPad. I'm going to drop this here, and I'm going to say, yes, I have the rights to use this image, and we can see it showing up here and also at the bottom. And if I generate, it's going to regenerate the variations that we have here in the middle. And there you go, we already have a really cool looking example here. If I like this, and I would like to see more similar to this. I can just click on the edit option and then choose Generate similar. So this way, the one that we chose will stay there on the top right corner, and we will just get three other similar examples to this. Now, these had a little bit too abstract, but I really like how unique each of them look. I could easily use photoshop and combine some of these elements together to make an even more exciting result. But if I like what I got here, I can just choose to download this. Or by using this icon at the bottom right corner, I can also save it to a Creative Cloud library. And by saving it to the library, I have to acknowledge that anyone who accesses the library will be able to view the image and also use and remix my prompt. So that's perfectly fine. Let's just continue. And here is my library that I created. I'm just going to set this as my default one, and I'm going to save. If I jump back to in design, I can already see this image showing up in my CC library panel, and I can drag and drop this character in here. But notice how the original background of this image is not completely wide. It looks like a photoshoot setup. And for this particular example, I would like to eliminate all of the cast shadows and background details. So what I'm going to do is to edit this in Photoshop. You can do that quickly by pressing auto Option key and double click on the image. And within Photoshop, I'm going to utilize this awesome feature, remove background, which is right there on the contextual task bar. It's created a beautiful mask, which we can see by Alter Option clicking on the mask icon, and it's great to see how close it is to my original structure reference that I created on my iPad. Now, you just have to repeat the same steps to create all the characters and then lay them out next to each other in a photoshop document. And then you can start using generative feel on certain areas to spice them up a bit. So for instance, if I wanted a grasshopper to be sitting here on the letter E, I'm just going to make a selection, then choose generative feel from the contextual Tas bar and type in grasshopper, then he generate. And there you go, we have one, two, three options to choose from. If I'm not happy with these, I can refine my prompt here and I can create more variations. I can even choose from the additional options, generate similar, if I like one example in particular. With this icon, I can even enhance the quality of this generated image. And similarly to the grasshopper, I'm just going to turn on a couple of additional generated details like this butterfly here, once again, before and after, then the little squirrel, which was using the prompt photo of a squirrel holding an acorn. That's exactly what we can see here. And before we have more variations to choose from, like this one looks great as well. Just as an interesting inside, here are a few generations where I was using an older image model when generative field first came out. These were the type of examples that you would normally get, and it's just crazy to see how much the newer image model improved the results that we get. Here on the T, we have a snail added, and we also have a little robin on the letter A. Now we are ready to just drop this text in here into our spread. And we just have to assure that there is enough space between the T and the U for the creep. So that's something that we can do in photoshop very quickly and easily, and now we can just place it in here and maybe just resize it, make it slightly bigger. 41. Conclusion: Well done for finishing this course. I hope you had just as much fun going through it as I had recording it. And of course, don't forget about the class project. Because remember, practice makes perfect. I can't wait to see your work, so make sure to submit it. And in case you like this course, and you would like to learn more from me, then there's plenty of other courses that you can find here. Go ahead check them out now. I can't wait to meet you in the next one.