Adobe Photoshop Unmasked: The Art and Science of Selections, Layers, and Paths

Layer masks are the best (and safest) way to conceal specific parts of an image. Let the mantra, "Mask it, don't delete it," guide your Photoshop journey from now on. It's easy to make a selection into a layer mask (and vice versa). Working with the transparency implicit in layer masks gives you a world of possibility for blending images and compositing images, as I hope this small sampling of examples has shown. Mess around with them; use them to cut things out, to blend two or more images in ways that are both obvious and incongruous; use them to composite images in ways that may be goofy or classy. But whatever you do, make it seamless. And no matter what you do with layer masks, you'll be able to sleep more soundly knowing that you're applying your changes to the mask and not to the layer itself. Everything you do is undoable. As we'll see in the next chapter, when you combine layer masks with adjustment layers, a good thing gets even better. Oh, and just in case I didn't mention it enough times in this chapter: white reveals, black conceals.