Masking techniques in Photoshop

The mask feature inside Photoshop is used for various things with manipulating of images and layers and mastering this feature is a great advantage for everyone. Basically the mask is a co-layer to the existing layer where the light points shows the visible areas of the image and the dark points the opposite, you can image this like an eraser which you can revert by simply brushing over the erased area with the opposite brush. In this tutorial i will show you various tools how you can apply and create a mask and so cut off also difficult shapes from the original image very easy.

We will go through traditional tools like the brush, selecting tools, and polygonal lasso tool to more complicated methods and techniques like the pen tool and channel selection. During the tutorial i will cut off a tree from his background using the channel technique and new features of Photoshop CS5. After the tree would be cut off i will replace the original technique and tune the image using filters and image processing tools available in Photoshop to create a new and more dramatic image. You can download all project files including the *.psd Photoshop files below.