Here’s a short tutorial on using layer masking to correct an image.
First, here’s our image. cute baby! The background looks a little dark to me. I’m going to correct for the background, but leave baby girl alone.
The first thing I like to do when working on any image in Photoshop is to copy my background layer. This is so that when I make corrections, I don’t damage the original image. But mostly it’s so I can see how great it’s looking!
For this image, we’ll be making our corrections only on the layer copy and masking for the original to show through.
“command + J” on a mac or ”control + J” on a PC.
You can rename the layer if you want, but I usually don’t.
Next, I’m going to adjust my levels to get my background lighter, but it will make baby girl look very pale.
Use the sliders under the histogram and move them until you like the way it looks. I used all three.
Here’s what we have now:
Look at the difference:
The background looks better, but baby girl is washed out.
Now I’m going to mask the baby so that my corrections only show on the background.
Create a layer mask on the corrected layer.
Right now, the mask is all white. We’re going to paint black where we want the original image to show.
You could just erase the corrected layer, but once it’s gone…well, it’s just gone. With a mask, you can go back and paint white in if you make a mistake.
Click on the mask, and using the paintbrush tool, paint with black. Don’t forget to go back and paint white if you overpainted!
Here’s the painted mask:
When making a correction like this, I usually save my file two ways. First, save as a photoshop file in layers in case you need to correct anything further, and secondly, as a copy of the original in jpg format.
Here’s the work, side by side:
I hope this helped you! Leave a comment and let me know if it did, and what you’d like to see next!
by RuthBerry
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