From the course: Adobe Certified Professional - Photoshop Cert Prep

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Create and edit masks

Create and edit masks

One of the most important concepts to wrap your head around in Photoshop is how masks work or how to use masking efficiently. So the first and most important thing to understand is that masking is a unique way of controlling the visibility of your layers. So we've already seen the opacity, fill opacity, blend modes or simply just hiding and showing layers these were all steps that we could use for controlling the visibility while masks or layer masks can be used in a more specific way of hiding parts of layers. So to understand how this works if you've never used layers before I'm going to demonstrate it by maybe hiding parts of this fortress. So I'm going to select the fortress layer first of all and then we can go to the bottom of the layers panel and find this rectangle with a circle inside it that's the mask icon. I like to call it the Japanese flag so if we click on that it's going to add this empty layer mask on the currently selected layer. This empty mask is completely white…

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