The best way to learn is through practical things. So I don't want to show you all of the selection options before I show you some introduction to the mask, which is crucial to work effectively in Photoshop. That's why I'm showing this right now. So what are masks? This is the first basic question when you start in Photoshop because that is one of the most important things in Photoshop. So whatever you open in Photoshop, whether it will be some adjustment layers, or anything else, let's let's start with adjustment layers that will be very simple.

If you don't know this is not like something you really need to know. But let's create one adjustment layer, let's say curve, and I'm not going to work with this right now. And also what I'm going to do, maybe I'm going to open some color Which will be color blue. And I'm not going to use this right now. So, as you can see next to this adjustment that exists over here we have this white squares. So these squares are your masks.

If the square has color white, it means the effect is visible. So right now when I make this blue color visible, we can see on the mask, it's white. So it means the effect color blue is visible. If the mask is black, the color will be invisible how to do this, when you work on Mac press Command, if you work on Windows press control and then I to invert. So now the mask has Culebra black effect is still visible, but it cannot be visible because of the mask. So I believe it's easy to understand right now.

And of course, you can make on the Part of the the effect divisible by painting on this mask we have black mask, I'm going to choose white color the brush white color. And let's paint on this I'm going to paint maybe half of the mask, something like that. And as you can see what is happening, I'm bringing the effect back. And why is it like that because let's have a look how the mask looks like you can easily check this by pressing option or out and hitting on the mask. That's how the mask looks like. So black color is the area where the effect is not visible white color where the effect is visible.

Of course we can change this multiple times by painting with the color black or, or color white. If I paint with color black Of course I removed my effect painting with color white, I apply my effect. This also gives you a very simple answer for why to use masks and not just paint on your image. That's what Very simple because you work non destructively, you can just change colors all the time, and paint as many times as you want. Fixing the issues if you do no mistake, and none of this is going to destroy your image, because you can simply fix this by painting on the mask and also you can simply make this layer and visible. The same with another effort.

I'm going to open curves right now just some different effects. Let's apply some contrast to the image. And the same, you can invert the mask and visible and visible and also you can paint on the mask with the color black in areas you don't want the effect and keep the color white into areas where you want the effort to be applied. So how it will be useful for selections. Let's remove this to learn layers right now. And as I mentioned to you before, Before, I want to the same as we were doing this in the first lesson, we're going to cut out the hand before the edges were not so clear.

But there is the simple way, how we can make the edges very clear. So I'm going to duplicate my background layer right now. And I'm going to call this selection, because I'm going to make the selection from exactly this layer. And for this, I'm going to use Quick Selection Tool the same as I was doing before. So let's select the hands as good as we can. So like here, the nail is not really perfectly selected and also hand over here.

I'm not going to be worried by this a lot. And what I'm going to do how to create the mask over here, see over here, in the bottom, you have this small icon, some round in this square, so you can simply hit that and as you can see over here by percent outro Now I'm going to open the mask is created. So we don't have to use layer via cut layer via copy, but we can just simply create the mask. So I believe this is very simple. Let's create now some background for it to see if our selection is right. We already know that selection will not be that perfect because it's really difficult but now we have the mask, so we didn't cut out the image part of the image.

So if we would do this, we would not have option of restoring part of the heart hand. But now because we didn't actually affect the actual image on the the mask, so I'm going to use the white color. So I'm using the brush course a little bit smaller and soft edges and Let me paint a little bit with the color white to restore the house. Of course, why not on the actual image but on the mask, second color white. And I'm painting of course right now as you can see, I'm not doing this very carefully. So I'm actually bringing back some of the background that this is okay because I will know where where my position lies.

So, right now I see the background and what I can do, invert this once again, and carefully, really carefully pan this next to the edge. And in this method, of course, that will be maybe just a little bit more time taken. But there will be better techniques to avoid this. But this was very important for me to show you why the masks are important because you want to work in Photoshop, non destructively. If you want to work non destructively. There is one rule.

Always work with the mask. So, in the next lesson, I'm going to show you a little bit more techniques, selection techniques are a little bit better for certain tests. And when we are going to meet them with, of course masks that we're going to practice over and over so you can feel fully comfortable with this. your selections will be super easy. So, right now let's take another example. Just quickly to practice a little bit more, I'm going to make a selection using the same Quick Selection Tool.

And this is quite good, actually. way easier, I believe, than in the hands because we will have on the few spots to fix over here, as you can see with the hair, so I'm not even I won't be even bothered to do anything more with this. Okay, but there's one problem that I already made us selection, but they didn't copy my layer. Don't worry, this is not a problem. I'm going to create the mask straightaway out from this little mistake. But now I'm going to copy.

And I'm going to remove the mask from the background from the layer numbers zero. So like he tried. And I'm going to remove this layer mask because simply I want to keep one layer clean. And now let's make our edges better. Let's use red color now. So as you can see, this site is just perfect.

We have some issues on this side. And that will be super easy to fix. When easier than with the hands that would take us a little bit more time, probably for this image. I would not use another technique than that I'm using now. I'm just going to make soft edges for it. Why I would not use other techniques, because always with the workflow, the time is also very important.

So I don't really, I'm not the person that wants to waste a lot of time on. And with every image at some images you can do with this simple, quick selection technique. So over here we have the ear, of course needs to be soften. There often will case where you actually go into effect some edges, but in the bigger picture that will not be visible and better to have a little just few pixels, soft, soft transmission between the edges and this soft cross instead of having this really angry, gritty edges, so that's what I would do. This imaginary finished, soften an edge over here. I hope we don't have anything called the other side of the head.

So I You can see I'm actually not trying to recover the single hair that I had summer there because they would not look nice in the composition actually so you don't need them a little bit more over here with the color black and the image would be sorted. So I could use now maybe some more universal colors actually want to work nicely with this image. And that would be let's say some of the bluish color like that suitable and that would be very simple way to replace the background using Quick Selection to end masks.