This creates very splotchy paint (or a splotchy mask).Īnd then at this point to try and get everything smooth and even, is very, very difficult. If I lift, it adds another 20% and so on. But if I lift and then I paint again, it adds another 20%. Now, it doesn’t matter if you’re using a mouse or a graphics tablet.īut here’s the thing. If you paint at 20% opacity you lay down some paint. What most people would do if they wanted to paint 20% is to drop opacity down to 20% and this is wrong. Check out my other tutorial on masking basics. If you paint with black, it hides the contents of that particular layer. When you paint with white, it reveals the contents of that particular layer. Opacity is basically how transparent it is in the flow is how fast you get there. Most people drop the opacity down to 20% and that is wrong. See, so what happens when you want to paint in a specific value, like maybe you want to do 20% here. I’m going to drop the flow down to 10% and we’re gonna start to paint in a little bit here. Check out my tutorial that talks about the difference. Let’s grab a brush and we’re going to start to paint. So let me just hit the D key to reset the foreground background colors. Now to bring back the contents of the layer, we’re going to paint white in here. What that does is it creates a black mask which hides the contents of the layer. So hold down the alt or the option key and then go in the layers panel and click on create mask. So the first thing we want to do is create a hidden mask or an inverted mask.

So this is not so much about the artwork is this is just understanding the technique I want to show you. So we’re just gonna use this picture of a woman and a cat on top. How to get smoother masking inside of Photoshop.Īlright, so I’m going to show you something about masking that few people realize.

Layer masks photoshop cc