OK, every time I think that I am starting to really learn the art of Photoshop and post-editing, I learn something new from one of the pros I follow that blows my mind! I’ve had Photoshop for a while now, but wonder how much I’ve really cracked into this software! Today I learned about layer masks and how to use them effectively, as well as various actions in Photoshop that can really make your colors pop off the screen. If you’re a seasoned pro in the ways of Photoshop, this might seem a little amateurish, but we were all here once, right?

One of my frustrations in trying to make certain colors pop in Photoshop is that it almost always had annoying side effects to other elements in the picture.  Make the sky bluer, and you also made the person’s eyes look unnatural and that blue car popped out too.  You could cut out the sky and make a new layer, but that was a ton of work and generally not worth it.  Try to bring out the red in those flowers the bride is holding, and anything orange started bleeding! But with layer masks, I can make changes to colors, and then choose specific parts of the picture that receive those enhancements...without having to cut them out manually! The gradient tool also makes more sense to me now, and I can gradually have an effect begin in a certain place and get more intense at the edge!

I decided to use a photo from my vacation to Honduras as my test picture to test out my new knowledge of layer masks. The first shot is directly out of my camera.  The second is perfectly what I envisioned when I imagined this shot at the time it was taken.  I was able to give the sky a richer blue and was able to make the people in the chair more silhouetted like I originally meant. And instead of it taking the hour I thought it would, and thus not being worth the edit, it took me less than 2 minutes! I am excited to see how this affects my processing work from now on!

seriously! photoshop rocks

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