Tag:photoshop
Black and white editing captures and reproduces images using only black, white, and grey shades. This can be achieved using both film and digital photography and is often used for artistic or documentary purposes. Black and white photos have a timeless appeal; they capture the essence of an image without the distraction of colour. Black and white photography also highlights textures, shapes, and patterns, which can create striking and dramatic compositions.
They can also create a mood or emotion, such as nostalgia or solemnity. Black and White are perfect for architecture, street photography, and portraits. In a black-and-white image, the composition and subject become the focus. But how to edit colour to black and white photos, and what mistakes to avoid?
You can create black-and-white photographs, with a black-and-white setting on your camera. However, today, we are going to convert colour images into black and white using photo editing software.
Mistakes to Avoid
- Lack of Contrast: in a nutshell, black and white images rely on light, shadows and contrast; without sufficient contrast, the image will be flat and dull.
- Excessive contrast: too much contrast results in loss of detail.
- Not exposing for the shadows: an excellent black-and-white photo will have crisp whites, rich blacks, and a good range of mid-grey.
- Not Shooting RAW: shooting in RAW will give you more control over the final edit, allowing you to change the white balance if needed in post.
- Ignoring the histogram: pay attention to the histogram when shooting and editing. This will ensure your highlights aren’t blown out and detail lost.
Different Methods
There are so many ways to do black-and-white editing – we will cover three ways here. All will work with Photoshop or Lightroom. There are also many free and premium actions and presets available for Photoshop and Lightroom. These will convert colour to black and White. Additionally, Luminar Neo will also convert a colour image to black and white. For this post, we are concentrating on simple but effective ways to do it in Lightroom and Photoshop.
Editing your colour image
TIP: When you open your images in Camera Raw or the LR develop module – click on the little box in the top right corner of the histogram (see below). In LR, the little arrow will be blue when active; in PS, it will be red. This will show your blown-out highlights in red. Bring the highlights slider down until the red disappears. Next, before you convert to black and White – edit your image. Make all necessary crops and adjustments, so you are starting with a clean edit. (if you click the box in the opposite corner it shows your crushed shadows).
Method One
Open your image in camera raw and click B&W on the right-hand panel. This will convert the image to monochrome. Open the B&W Mixer in the panel and move the sliders to your liking. Next, click Open to bring it into Photoshop. From here, you can edit using your normal workflow.
Method Two: Black and White Adjustment in Photoshop
One of the most straightforward ways (without the additional cost of buying actions) is to apply a black-and-white adjustment layer. At the bottom of your layers panel, like the round black and white cookie type symbol, and from the menu that pops up, choose black and white. Your image will instantly become black and white, with a colour slider window opening.
Play with the sliders until it’s to your liking – or click the auto option above the red, and PS will adjust for you.
Once you are happy with it – as a final step, you can flatten the image and then, in Camera Raw, make a final adjustment to contrast and clarity.
Method three – Photoshop
The second super easy method is opening the image in Camera Raw and bringing the vibrance and saturation down to 0%. You won’t be able to adjust the HSL slider with this method, but you can adjust the contrast, clarity and blacks in Camera Raw.
Method Four – Lightroom
The third method – for lightroom users is to open the image in the develop module and click on Black & White. From here is a simple matter to play with the clarity and contrast sliders to achieve the desired result. Lowering the temperate will make an image colder (blue) or warmer (orange); this will also adjust the tones in your photo.
Some famous photographers known for their black-and-white work include Ansel Adams, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and Dorothea Lange. Black and white photography remains a popular and respected art form today, and its beauty and impact are likely to endure for many years to come.
Luminar Neo is arguably the best sky replacement out there. With a host of new tools, including layer masking, it’s hard to go past.
A brief history
Initially released by Macphun, Luminar has been around for over ten years now. The company was started in 2008 by two Ukrainian gaming software developers. As the company grew, its focus moved to creative photography. In 2015, Macphun partnered with Trey Ratcliff and developed an HDR program named Aurora. Luminar, intended as an all-in-one alternative to Photoshop, was released in 2015.
Initially, Luminar was only available for the macOS. However, in 2018 Luminar also included a Windows PC version in its release, and it was at this time, Macphun changed its name to Skylum. Luminar Ai was released in 2021, and Luminar Neo followed in 2022. All Luminar products have featured sky replacement, with each new release improving the technology. Over the years, Luminar has won many prestigious industry awards for photo editing innovation, including four gold awards at the Digital Camera Grand Prix.
Luminar Ai
Luminar Ai was a brand new product – not an upgrade to Luminar 3 or 4. Instead, it offered an entirely new approach to photo editing powered by artificial intelligence. Luminar Ai also introduced various tools for portraits and enhanced the landscape tools. The sky replacement in Luminar Ai also received a significant upgrade.
Luminar Neo
Like Luminar Ai – Luminar Neo was a new product built from the ground up – not an upgrade. The portrait bokeh is excellent, with Neo automatically masking out your subject to isolate the background. You then adjust the sliders to your liking to create a creamy bokeh behind your subject. How much bokeh remains entirely within your control. The Relight feature is another excellent addition. Neo calculates the depth of the image and creates a 3D map. You can then adjust the light naturally from front to back.
However, the sky replacement is why I use Luminar in all its iterations. Too often, I have taken a shot that I was happy with, except for the bland sky. Returning time and time again to get the shot in perfect conditions isn’t always feasible. So sky replacement saves the day. I remember when sky replacement was in its infancy, and trying to do it in a heavily treed image almost drove me to drink! In Neo, adding your own custom skies is much easier, and the replacement sky will now also reflect onto the water, ensuring your sky replacement looks more natural.
Do You Need Both?
So, the big question is, I guess, do you need Luminar Neo if you already have Luminar 4 or Ai? Well, it depends on which one you have. Luminar 4 was notoriously (painfully) slow to load and process images, so if you didn’t upgrade from Luminar 4 to Luminar Ai, I would definitely recommend you take the plunge for Luminar Neo. If, however, you do have Luminar Ai, I would still consider Luminar Neo a good investment. This is because the loading and processing of Neo are markedly faster again. In addition, the interface is more intuitive and straightforward. Plus, there are all those lovely new features.
Neo’s rebuilt engine has much better speed and performance than Ai, and with Neo, you gain the ability to add layers, much like Photoshop. Luminar Neo also has the Remove Powerlines and Remove Dust Spots. Both work with a single click without time-consuming manual masking. There is, however, a brush option to manually remove more complicated power lines and dust spots. However, at the time of writing this, only Luminar Ai has Dodge and Burn and Clone. However, neither of those tools is a deal-breaker to me, as I have them in Photoshop.
Sale Starts today!
Skylum’s summer sale starts today with a massive 60% saving on Luminar Neo. Luminar Neo is usually priced at $123 Au – less the loyalty discount if you already have a Skylum product. Both programs offer a free trial and give a 30 money-back guarantee on your purchase. Lifetime licences with standard updates are included.
- The summer sale price of Luminar Neo, a one-time purchase, is $67 for one licence or $84 for two licences(around $50 off). They are also including Aurora HDR and Nature templates for free
Click HERE for the special sale price – Sale ends June 10, 2022
Verdict
I have been with Luminar since Luminar 4. I then bought Luminar Ai as soon as it was released. The following year I purchased Luminar Neo with the early bird special – and I can say unreservedly, I love it. It’s packed with more advanced features than Luminar Ai and is faster and simpler to use. I still have Ai on the computer for when I want to access the few things Neo doesn’t have, and Skylum is still putting out updates to Luminar Ai. I do expect, however, that Luminar Neo will eventually catch up, and when that happens, I will uninstall Luminar Ai. If you own Luminar Ai, upgrading to Neo will give you a better experience, and with your loyalty discount, it’s excellent value. For me, Luminar Neo, with its superior sky replacement and faster processing, is a clear winner.
disclosure:
The links given here are affiliate links. While they won’t cost you any extra, I may receive a commission if you purchase using the links in this post. However, these are programs I bought myself and are highly recommended.
Pre Photoshop, an image was worth a thousand words and proof of something’s existence. Post photoshop – yes, the camera does lie. IG influencers with shoddy photoshop skills share images making themselves thinner or curvier. We now have experts, hunting down photo fabricators, examining pixels and EXIF to see if the image is doctored. Prestigious competitions demand you have a RAW copy of the image if they want to check its authenticity. There is even an app now for businesses to weed out fake IDs.
If you arent one to enter competitions with said rules, or you aren’t submitting the image as true and newsworthy, then Photoshop is a whole heap of fun. It takes your image beyond simple cloning out distractions or adding the odd bird here and there, opening a whole new world of composition related art.
Obviously, I was not in a boat in the arctic with three polar bears but it was fun to imagine the scenario and bring it to life. Photoshop also played a big part in the image below of my nephew. This image required no compositing as we created our set and shot the photos – but photoshop turned it into a whole different concept.
The Concept
I wanted something along the Game of Thrones, north of the wall look. We setup our backdrop and dressed our subject in medieval costume. From there I took the images into photoshop.
The Editing
To get that cold, blue look, in ACR, I brought the temperature down to 3100. I also upped the whites to +42 and dropped the highlights to -76. From there I ran a few of my favourite actions from Greater than Gatsby (they have a 35% off sale on at the moment too). I also used the Detail Revealer brush on the face, turned the eyes blue (another GTG action), and using a selective cool workflow brush cooled down the skin tones. Lastly, I added two snow overlays from Summerana.
The whole edit took about ten steps and 10 minutes. I do love photoshop. But I don’t feel the need to reinvent the wheel and spend hours on one image when there are tools out there to speed up my workflow. Why handwrite a 5000-word essay when we have computers? To me, it’s the same thing. It’s just time management. Yes, there are a lot of crappy actions out there, but there are pearls among them and GTG stands out. They are in fact the only ones I now use having ditched all the crappy free ones. And no, it’s not a paid endorsement.
If you haven’t got into Photoshop actions yet, give them a try. They will speed up your workflow immeasurably as well as create work you didn’t think yourself capable of.
Facial Editing
For some time now I have been using Luminar 4 to replace skies, and it does an amazing job. This week, however, Photoshop added some new tools in the V22.0 update for sky replacement and facial editing.
New to this version is Neural filters. You’ll find them under filters in the top menu bar. At the moment there is smoothing and blur for faces, plus a host of beta filters. The smoothing and blur work great for portraits. The beta filters, however, need a lot more work. When trying the happiness filter I ended up with ghosting around the lips and double eyebrows. Trying the head direction left ghosting around the edges of the face. Great idea, and I hope once it is no longer a ‘beta’ release it will work as it should.
To use the Neural filters click on filters and the new screen will open up. Click on skin smoothing to activate it and you can then move the sliders to your liking
The beta filters are activated by clicking on the little science beaker. The first time you use it you have to download them and they are installed and ready to go in one step. They really aren’t release ready yet though. I found them highly inaccurate.
Sky replacement
The sky replacement does work a treat. It’s easy and quick to use, accurate, and saves having to go over into Luminar to perform a basic sky replacement. To change the sky you simply click edit then scroll down to sky replacement
Once you click on sky replacement the next window opens and it starts working straight away swapping in the sky that’s open at the time. You can click the down arrow beside the thumbnail to choose a different sky. Another neat feature is by clicking the little sprocket icon you have the ability to import and use your own skies should you wish to.
I found the sky replacement very accurate with no halo’s or ghosting even through the trees and fine details in the structure at the top of the silo.
The sky replacement in Photoshop would certainly give Luminar a run for its money as it works great, and for skies that don’t have water in the foreground, it will definitely save me swapping over to Luminar to change the sky. Would it not be for the new Luminar Ai coming out soon that does sky replacement and reflects into the water for more realistic waterscapes I probably would stay solely in Photoshop.
But with the added water reflections feature in the upcoming Luminar program I will still be upgrading to the new Luminar Ai. For those who don’t have Luminar, the new sky replacement tools in Photoshop is definitely a great addition.
Should landscape photographers manipulate images? (take vs make an image) Manipulating an image, is it acceptable? I would have to say, straight off the bat, that I am firmly in the camp of making the image. While I hope for a great sky or light when I shoot, I am not against swapping in a new sky or adding light to create a better image. When the circumstances or conditions have given me lemons, I make lemonade.
Straight from the camera?
I also realise that some of you are throwing up your hands in horror and reminding me that this is totally unacceptable when entering competitions. However, I don’t enter competitions, and should I enter one, I wouldn’t use an image that has been heavily manipulated. Apart from that, I love manipulating an Image. Painters don’t necessarily paint what they see. They take artistic license – and people accept that as normal. With photographers, though, there is a large school of thought that the image should be as it was photographed, without adding or removing elements. So I tend to regard myself as someone who paints with a camera. I guess I could call myself a creative or ‘fine art photographer’ as it seems that you can change elements in fine art.
This school of thought seems to apply almost exclusively to landscape photography, and to a lesser degree, portraits. For an image that is obviously a composite or more in the digital manipulation section, adding or removing elements is not only acceptable but part of the process.
Changing a sky
Back in January, back when the world was still chugging along, oblivious to the oncoming pandemic and associated lockdowns, I enjoyed a quick overnight trip down to Portland where we stayed at the Cape Nelson Lighthouse. Coming back, we stopped off at a lavender farm. The sky was a bland white; the lavender wasn’t a lovely purple without sunshine. Had we been there in perfect conditions – I could have gotten the shot I wanted. However, at home, with Photoshop and Luminar, I edited and created the image that I could have gotten had the conditions been right… as a painter could without criticism.
Making the image doesn’t mean every image I take is manipulated, but I am not against having it in my bag of tricks. I also believe that if an image does have a swapped in the sky, it’s a bit dishonest to pretend it’s not. But, at the end of the day, my images are for me. I don’t sell them (no one wants them, LOL). I don’t enter competitions. They are just for my enjoyment, so I am not cheating or fooling anyone.
With the new Luminar Ai due out before the end of the year, this topic will not go away. Full disclosure, I have already pre-ordered my copy. What are your thoughts? Do you take or make an image?
Creating surreal little planets is something you can do at home, from the comfort of your chair. Using landscape images or panorama’s that you had taken pre-lockdown – you can create unique surreal images simply in Photoshop in just a few steps.
The right image
Choosing the image that will create a surreal little planet is about half the equation. It would help if you had a landscape or pano with a sky of 30% or more. It also helps if the horizon on both sides of the image is reasonably level. This forms the area around our circular planet. Panorama’s do work best for surreal little planets, but with one extra step, landscape work. If you have a panorama to start with, you can skip ahead.
Using a landscape Image
If you don’t have a panorama suitable, you can still create an incredible little planet. We’ll make our image wider. This is the image we’re using.
With your image open in photoshop, select the crop tool. As soon as you do this, you will see white ‘handles’ appear around the edges of your image. Grab the right-hand middle handle and drag it to the right.
Drag it to the right until the new area is about one third wider than your image. It doesn’t have to be exact. It will go white once you let go of the left click. Next, we want to copy what’s on the left and put it on the right. To do this, select the Rectangular marquee tool. It’s the second one from the top, and drag a box around your left-hand image. The ‘marching ants’ will mean it’s active.
On your keyboard choose Ctrl + C (Command + C on Mac) to copy and Ctrl + V (Command + V on Mac) to paste. It will look like nothing has happened as it’s directly over the top of your image. But don’t stress.
On the top menu bar beside File, click Edit – scroll down to Transform and Flip Horizontal. Now you still have one image, but it’s reversed. Don’t stress we are going to move it to the white area.
Select your move tool (it’s the four-sided arrow at the top). Next, left click on your image and drag it to the right over the white area. Move it till you are happy with its position. I kept mine reasonably close together, but that’s a personal choice.
You will find you have a line where they join. To fix this, click the layers panel, then click the icon at the bottom (it looks like the Japanese flag). That will create a layer mask on your image. Next, take the brush tool, select black as your foreground colour, set the opacity to about 40%, and brush over the join to blend them in. If you take too much off, brush with white to put it back. Don’t stress getting a perfect match; we can refine that at the end stage after it’s warped.
I didn’t use all the new area I created, so that I will crop that off.
That’s it. We now have our panorama and can make our little planet. If you already have a panorama – then this is where you start.
Using a Panorama Image
You can skip this step if you want – but it will make the result a bit better.
Click on the gradient tool – if you can’t see it, it’s behind the paint bucket. Just left-click and hold over the bucket, and the submenu will pop up. Next, click on your foreground colour palette at the bottom of the left taskbar. Then move towards your image, your cursor will turn into an eyedropper. Hover over the sky on your image. Click about the middle of the sky, and you will see the foreground colour on your colour palette is now blue. Next, click on the gradient tool (13th tool down, again left-click and hold if you don’t see it as it’s behind the paint bucket). You will see the gradient editor in the top menu – make sure you are on the first one to the right of the colour window.
Left-click and hold just above the image in the centre, and drag down into the sky, and stay within the sky as much as you can. You don’t want to colour your trees or whatever you have. When you let go, the blue will be even from one side to the other.
We’re on the home stretch now. Click the image, then Image Size – we need to make the image square. You will see the little chain link is active – this keeps the image in proportion. For the sake of what we are doing, we don’t want that. Click on it to turn it off, and the lines linking both sizes will go. (don’t forget to turn it back on once you are finished with your planets)
I tend to keep the smallest side pretty much the same in the actual size. Mine is 8821 x 5196, so I will go 5000 x 5000. Now that it’s looking odd, we need to flip it 180°. Go to image – then Image Rotation – then 180°
Last Step!
Except for some tidying up, we are almost done. Click Filter > Distort > Polar Coordinates. The little window will pop up – make sure its set to Rectangular to Polar
Final Housekeeping
Our little planet is done but needs a little bit of cleaning up. Also, I’m not too fond of that distinct blue ring around it on the right-hand side. I would rather it blended a bit more.
To do that, I clicked the foreground colour again to activate the eyedropper and click on the deeper blue just inside the edge of the outer circle. Then I swapped to the brush tool (9th tool down). I set the opacity to 30% on the top menu, then brushed over the outer paler areas till it blended (staying within the lighter areas). To select the size of the brush, use the bracket keys on your keyboard [ to make the brush/spot smaller or ] to make it bigger.
Lastly, I used the spot healing brush (it’s behind the bandaid 8th tool down; hold and click again if you don’t see it) to clean up those spotty bits of branches hanging down. As well as the bad join at the top of the branches.
And we are done. I hope you found this helpful. Have fun with your surreal little planets! For more inspiration check out Paul Reiffers gallery
Splash of colour is a favourite technique of mine. Its also easy to do using the free downloadable action, which is also known as Selective colour. You convert an image to B&W and then bring back the colour instead of changing the colour to another one. It’s a creative way of picking out a colour to make it or the object, the focal point of your image.
Choosing the right image
Images with a strong prominent colour work best, and while you can do lots of different colours, my preference is towards images with just one colour or one element of multi colours.
How do you do Splash of Colour?
There are loads of tutorials on Youtube and the web, all going about it differently. In the post, it can be done in Photoshop or Lightroom, though some camera’s such as Sony, allow you to do it in-camera. However, I prefer PS and use an action because it simplifies the entire process. Accordingly, I have included the free action to download at the end of the post.
One way to do it manually (in PS) is to add a black and white adjust layer – then use a black brush wipe back to expose the colour. However, if you make a mistake, change to a white brush to brush back the B&W. You can also use an action or create your own to make it easier and quicker each time.
Free Splash of Colour Action
The free action below uses black and white adjustment layers. It just saves you that step, and you can go straight to brushing back colour.
Download the free Photoshop action to create your own selective colour images.
In this time of worldwide lockdowns and #stayathome – amusing oneself is not easy. Read a book, clean the house, edit some images. Ok, what do we do in Week 2? Enter Multiplicity.
My original plan this week was to take a leaf out of Thomas Heaton’s book and try some macro at home. But after watching Chris Sale’s vlog on multiplicity (or as he called it, multiple exposure selfie), I decided to try that first. Apart from I would l have less mess to clean up – I could do it with minimal effort and no extra supplies.
Taking the Shots
You will need a camera, though a phone will work if you can put it on a tripod, but this post is cameracentric.
To take the images, I placed the camera on my tripod set to a waist-high height. Looking through the lens at 24mm, I couldn’t get everything in, so I swapped it out for the wide-angle and shot at 16mm. The entire image was taken in manual mode with autofocus. Because I didn’t want to use a flash, I also bumped the ISO to 800 with an F-stop of 9 to make sure everything was (reasonably) sharp. This gave me a shutter speed of 1/6 sec. Light isn’t great in the back room on an overcast day. It’s also important that you don’t move it between shots when you set the tripod up. Pick a location that will get all your planned shots in without repositioning the tripod.
I could have used the ten-sec timer – but chose to use my phone connected to the camera via wifi. The advantage of this is I could ‘see’ myself on the phone and set the shot up, then using the phone as a remote, take the image.
Overall, I took 5 images but ended up only using four as one of the shots almost completely obscured another one. I also changed my tops between shots to give a bit more interest. Be sure when you shoot yours, you allow space between yourself; as I mentioned, I lost a shot because one of me was standing in front of the other.
Editing Your Multiplicity
Once I had my shots, I downloaded them to the computer. From there are soooo many ways, you do it. I could be called lazy, but I prefer the term efficient. 😉 This is what works for me. I also worked solely in Photoshop, as I don’t use Lightroom. However, if you are a lightroom user, you can import them into Photoshop from Lightroom as layers.
- Once you have all the images open in photoshop, choose one that will be your base image. It doesn’t really matter which one is.
- go to the second image and hit Cntrl/cmd A then Cntrl/cmd C (this will select and copy the entire image)
- now go to your base layer and hit Cntrl/cmd V, and it should be pasted over the top of the base layer.
- On the adjustments panel, hit the little icon that looks like a Japanese flag
- this creates a mask over your image (it should be white) so choose a black soft brush to brush away the part of the image where you were in the bottom layer to reveal yourself. You should now have two of you
- repeat steps 2-5 with each of the remaining images
- when ‘all’ of you are there, flatten the image and edit as you would normally.
I enjoyed doing it – to the extent, I created another one the next day outside. Being in stage three restrictions with Corona Virus my front yard was as far as I dared go. It also required me to interrupt the dogs morning nap as I roped her in. Give it a go – and would love to see your results – just add a link in the comments section.
What is a layer mask?
Layer masks are an essential tool in Photoshop to create image manipulations. Among other uses, they allow you to ‘stack’ multiple images and expose only certain parts of the image/s above the base layer, creating a composite image. You can do this using an eraser – but that is DESTRUCTIVE. If you remove something you wanted to keep, you have to go back to it before you erase that spot, possibly undoing other work. Layer masks allow you to work NON DESTRUCTIVELY – if you remove something you wanted to keep, it’s super easy to get it back, and you don’t lose your work.
Lets Get Started
We’re using images from our recent splash! workshops, and the first set is by Beck Faldon
Step by Step
The goal is to combine all three, so we have the iceblock and both splashes in one image. Hence the magic of layer masks.
- Open Photoshop and go to File>Scripts> Load files into stack. From the little window that pops up, click ‘browse’, then find and select the images you want to use. As the images I’m working with were taken on a tripod with virtually no difference between them, composition wise, I am also going to place a tick in the box ‘attempt to automatically align source images. Then click ok.
- Photoshop will now open all files, and if you click on your layers tab you will see they are all there, one on top of each other. You will also see that each layer has an eyeball beside it.. when the eyeball is visible that layer is visible, if you click the eyeball it turns that layer off. Its still there, but no longer visible.
- Click the eyeball on the top layer and turn it off for now. We are going to work on the second layer first up. To add the layer mask, click on the second layer (the middle one) so it’s active, then look to the bottom of the layers tab.
- Click on the white rectangle with a black circle in the middle. It looks like the Japanese flag. You will now have a white rectangle beside your second layer. It’s important to remember that you must be doing it on the mask, not the image when you are painting. See below the white bounding box around the white mask that shows me I am painting on that. If you are painting and it starts turning black or white, you are painting directly on the image.
- Go back a few steps until you have undone that, click on the white mask to make the mask active and start again.
To Conceal or reveal
The key to layers masks is remembering that white reveals black conceals. The layer mask is white. So you need to paint with black. Choose your brush tool, select 0% hardness, then click the black palette at the bottom of your main toolbar on the left. Clicking the little double-sided arrow above your black and white palettes will toggle between black and white. You see 100% opacity on the image above, bring it down to about 70%, and see the layer below – it will help you choose what to reveal.
When you are finished, bring the opacity back up to 100%. As you paint, the mask will start to show black areas, where you painted concealing the top layer and revealing the layer below. Make your brush smaller and change it to a 100% hard brush to get into tight spots. If you take off parts of the image you want to keep, go back to your palette and click on the white palette to swap to a white brush. Now paint back the area you lost. All the images were taken on a tripod, and there are no differences except the cup. I am painting the splash above the cut to combine the splash from both images into one.
Masking
You can now see that there is black on your layer mask. There is where I brushed over the cup. The black area of the second layer is now hidden where it’s black, revealing the splash below. Now we want to bring the ice cube into the pic. Turn the top layer back on by clicking the empty box on the layer (where the eyeball isn’t), and the eyeball will come back as the layer is now turned on. Don’t panic when you see that you’ve lost the splash. It’s all still there, just hidden below. Click the top layer to activate it, then click the ‘Add layer mask’ icon again (the Japanese flag). You will have another white rectangle now, just like the second layer.
Almost there
The area we want to expose now is the entire cup, keeping the falling IceCube above. Select the black brush again and paint over the cup to reveal the splash but keep the ice cube. Likewise, just change to a white brush and paint it back if you make a mistake. Once you have finished, go to layer>Flatten image and edit in your usual way. In the case of this one, I cropped and cloned out the inside of the bag you could see in the sack. (it was there to puff the sack up and make it look fuller). I also added a subtle vignette.
Some More Examples
Layer masks have many uses; if you are into family portraits and shoot them on a tripod, you can layer the images and remove heads cause it’s a battle to get everyone looking at the camera, eyes open, smiling. Layer the images, and you can brush out the ‘offending’ head. I hope you found this helpful. Feel free to leave a like or comment 🙂