Good morning, all! It’s Carrin again and I’m going to talk to you a little bit about masks in today’s Tips, Trends and Techniques post. Masks in Photoshop are just like masks in real life; they are there to either show or hide pieces of a photo or object. Today I’m going to focus on two types of masks: layer masks and photo masks.

Layer masks are used to create such techniques as the popular “peekaboo” cutout or to hide the edges of photos. Take a look at the following screenshots and see what I mean…

Place all your papers on your canvas, in the order in which you want them to appear.

Click on the layer to which you want to apply the mask. At the bottom of the layers palette is a gray box with a white circle…that’s the layer mask button. Click on it!

Now, click on the white square and add your shapes using a black brush (any shape you want…most peekaboo layouts feature circles, but I wanted stars since this is a 4th of July layout). The black will hide the portions of the paper you’d like to hide…using white will show them.

Once you’re satisfied with the shapes you’ve created, you can unlink the paper and the mask by clicking on the piece of chain between them. Now you can move your shapes around your page to make it perfect.

Lastly, when you are happy with the position of your peekaboos, right click on the white square and select apply layer mask to flatten it all out.

Here’s my final product. I mixed it up a little bit by erasing part of the red paper so that the blue star paper came through on two of the stars. The sky’s the limit when your digi-scrapping!

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Photo masks (or clipping masks) are typically black or grayscale shapes that you place on a layout and clip your photo down. They can be used to add a unique shape to your photo, add words to help tell your story or create a funky border. Still confused? Check out A Mask A Day, vol. 1 by Trixie.

To use these or something similar, first you need to drag your mask onto your layout. Next, place your photo on a layer above the mask and clip down (I like to use the ctrl-alt-g shortcut). Finally, make any adjustments to your photo, such as resizing or moving within the mask, before you flatten the two together. Voila! You have a photo that helps to give your page a little more punch. Again, here are a couple of screen shots to help out you visual learners!

Here you can see that I have placed both the photo and the mask on my canvas. Make sure the photo is on the layer above the mask.

Next, clip the photo down onto the mask. You can either right-click in the photo in the layers palette and select “Create Clipping Mask” or the shortcut ctrl-alt-g.

Make adjustments as needed to your photo and then merge the two layers (right-click on the photo and select “Merge Down” or use ctrl-e). Easy peasy, right?

Now, are you ready for a little surprise? I’ve made a special gift for you for joining me today…a set of your very own masks! I’ve included a couple different options for you: a couple of large masks that you can use to create layered background papers, a couple of big word masks that you can use on a photo or a paper to make a cool title, and two rectangular photo masks (or you could use them for photo mats with paper). I hope you enjoy them and make sure you stop on over to the Trixie Scraps Gallery and share what you’ve made!

All Trixie Scraps Designs products can be found in the following online stores:
Trixie Scraps Shop * Gotta Pixel * Scrapbook Bytes * Funky Playground