The Enthusiast's Guide to Photoshop

37. WORKING WITH LAYER MASKS

LAYER MASKS ARE one of the most important features of Photoshop. Previously in Photoshop, when you wanted to use an individual element from an image, you often had to cut out the element and put it onto its own layer, and that worked very well. However, the problem with this method was that when you needed to go back and add to or remove portions of the element, you would have to go all the way back to the original source document and do the process all over again.

So how do you set yourself up to make duplicates or copies of an element that gets stuck inside of a layer process, but at the same time have the malleability ...