Mask
Next we’ll use a Layer Mask to accurately remove all areas of our Teeth Layer that aren’t actually teeth – i.e the gums, lips etc.
Masks and their creation and manipulation are one of the most important things to master in Photoshop. We’ll have a tutorial dedicated solely to masking soon. In the meantime, what you need to know for our project is this:
Masks are a non-destructive and infinitely adjustable way of erasing (or, more accurately, hiding) areas of an image.
Once you create (or select) a Layer Mask, your colour palette reverts to White for your foreground colour and Black for the background colour. This is how a Layer Mask is told which parts of the layer to show and which to hide – every area that is painted white in the Layer Mask is fully visible in the image, whereas every area that is Black in the Layer Mask is completely invisble in the image. You can also control levels of visibility by using various shades of grey in a mask – the lighter the grey, the more visible that area of the layer will be.
Create a layer mask by clicking on the icon second from the left at the bottom of the layers palette. Once we create a layer mask, we then use the brush tool to “paint in” the areas we want to see (the teeth) and paint out everything else.
The beauty of this is that we can effectively erase any areas of the layer that we wish to by using the brush tool to paint the corresponding are of the layer mask with black but, if we make a mistake, we can simply switch to a white colour and paint those areas back in again.It’s a lot simpler than it sounds.
Make sure that the Layer Mask symbol (the one from the icon at the bottom of the Layers palette) is also showing to the right of the eye symbol on our Teeth layer in the Layers Palette – this shows that we are painting into our mask and not into the image itself.Now, try painting into the Layer Mask with a brush tool to get rid of the unwanted areas of our Teeth layer – use a slightly soft-edged brush. If you make a mistake, simply press [X] to swap foreground and background colours so that you can paint the mistake back in.