Just a little something I cobbled together this afternoon instead of working. So I hope someone finds it helpful.

Layer masks are where the rubber meets the road in PhotoShop. They are the tools used every day by professionals to selectively alter colors, sharpness, saturation...to combine parts of different images into a striking compositions and many other things. They are powerful and complex, but yet simple to grasp if explained right. I hope I can do that here.

For the first lesson, let's do a simple image blending. Grab a copy of these two images (Right Click-Copy in Widows) and paste them into a new PS document. They are the same size pixelwise so they should stack nicely.

http://www.pbase.com/chefziggy/image/43210721/medium.jpg
http://www.pbase.com/chefziggy/image/43210723/medium.jpg

Change the opacity of the top layer to 50%. You'll have something similar to the image below. Rather confusing, isn't it?

http://www.pbase.com/chefziggy/image/47104362/original.jpg

Next click on the layer mask button in the layers palette. I've included a link to that button below in case you don't know where it is.
http://www.pbase.com/chefziggy/image/47104363/original.jpg;

This will add an empty layer mask to your top layer and will select the layer mask. You can tell if you have the layer mask selected (as opposed to the layer itself) by looking at the thumbnails. The selected layer mask will have a faint line around it. A highlight, sort of.

http://www.pbase.com/chefziggy/image/47104364/original.jpg

Notice that the color palette is now black and white. (May be white and black.) When working on the layer mask you can only use black and white or shades of grey. For our demonstration make black the foreground color. Using the gradient tool (simple linear gradient) draw a short horizontal line just across the center of the image. If all worked out well, you should see something like this.

http://www.pbase.com/chefziggy/image/47105253/original.jpg

Hey! The one monkey is looking better, but what's up with the right side? We changed the opacity in the beginning, remember? So select the layer by clicking on it's thumbnail. Notice also that the layer mask's thumbnail has changed. It looks like it is now half black and half white.... Hmmm. Change the opacity of the top layer (not the mask) back to 100%. The final image should look like this.

http://www.pbase.com/chefziggy/image/47105254/original.jpg

Viola! Now play around with the mask by selecting it again and drawing various gradients on it. This should help you begin to understand masks. When you are done, move on to the next message.
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Chefziggy
http://www.pbase.com/chefziggy
http://www.pbase.com/image/38077483/small.jpg