Creating a mask from the selection - Photoshop Tutorial

- [Instructor] Here's our receptionist as a cutout, and if we switch to the move tool, we can double-tap anywhere on the canvas to go to 100%. To make the cutout, we could delete the area outside the receptionist, but a better way is to make a mask, and we can do that by tapping the mask button. The marching ants disappear and she's cut out for us. Now we can fix some of those small errors. Let's zoom in. When we look at the two different views, we could see what's going on. If we tap the compact layer view, we're looking at the mask, and if we swipe to the left, we're now working on the layer, and the compact layer view only shows one of these at a time. If we switch to the full layer view instead, we'll hide the compact view and then open the full view, we can now see both the layer and the mask side by side. We want to work on the mask, so tap on that, and the blue rectangle around it shows that it's selected. The thing about layer masks is they hide part of the layer without deleting it. Let's put the panel away then switch to the brush tool. To hide part of the layer, we paint in black. So we'll swipe down on the color swatches to swap those over, and black is now the foreground color. We'll tap the size button and take it down so it's much smaller, and we'll tap the hardness button to make sure it's at maximum hardness. We slide up and down to get a soft edge brush, and up to the top to get a hard brush, and we now paint over this layer, painting in black allows us to hide the layer where we paint. If we make a mistake, we can easily undo that. Let's swap over our foreground and background colors again, and we want to change the foreground color to white. So tap on it and drag the slider up to the top left corner to get pure white. When we now paint in this color, we're revealing the layer again, and we can add that missing part of the leg as well. We don't need to switch between those colors. If we hold on the shortcut button, we now get the eraser tool temporarily, and so we can take out the areas we don't want in our selection along the top and down the side, and we can release it to paint in white to reveal our layer again. There's a little glitch just in the joint of these two struts, so we'll hold the shortcut button to paint those out, and we can release the button to paint it back in again. We could spend longer tinkering with this to get it exactly right, but because the stool's going to be hidden by the desk, we'll leave it there for now. Once again, we'll switch to the move tool, double-tap anywhere to our completed image. So with a layer mask, you paint in black to hide the layer, and you paint in white to reveal the layer again, and this enables you to create much more accurate cutouts than you can achieve just with the regular selection tools.