How to mask your images using a clipping mask

Alright. In this video we're gonna look at how  to use a clipping mask. Now a clipping mask is a really great way  of cropping an image down to use. Let's see what the final product's gonna look like. It's the square image here  and I'm gonna show you how to do that  with what's called a clipping mask. First thing is, let's turn this eyeball off on our image  books layer and what we do is we start with a rectangle.

I'm gonna turn my guides back on command colon. Okay? And I want it to span, say four guides here. I want it to be a perfect square. So what I do is I hold down shift while I'm dragging it. And can you see it locks the height and width along.

Okay? So I'm gonna drag it so it fits across these four. Now it doesn't really matter  what color we're gonna use at the moment  'cause clipping masks don't matter that much. I'm gonna use my move tool and I'm gonna move it down a  little bit so it's kind of in the center of my box. And what I wanna do now is I'm gonna pop 'em in  and I'm gonna turn my image back on. Now my image needs to be a bit more  of an appropriate size for this square.

So I'm gonna use my, with the layer select,  I'm gonna use my transform tool command T, okay. Or control T on a pc. And I'm gonna holding the shift key down on the corners  to lock the height and width. Otherwise it ends up kind  of stretching it and distorting it. So I'm gonna use the shift key down. And then I'm not too worried  that it's gonna be perfect around here.

I'm kind of cropping it in for a fact. I'm gonna hit enter when it's transforms done. And what I need to do is I need to make sure  that the image is above my rectangle. I'm gonna rename this rectangle  and let's call this one the, this one's the um,  who image it's on my Who We Are page. Okay, so he's underneath. Now what I wanna do is crop this guy, okay?

Which is the, uh, image about the books to the square. To do it, the easy way is  with the image layer selected hold on the alt key. Can you see this little icon here? With the box? With the arrow? This is gonna turn the top image  and bottom image and join them together  and make a clipping mask.

You can see what's happened in  the structure here and the layers. And you can see what's happened over here in  my actual image. I'm gonna turn my guides off to make it pretty. The beauty of it is that this kind of who box  underneath here and this image is actually,  they're actually separate so I can move 'em around. So what I can do is, let's say that, uh, the box I want  to crop slightly differently, um, I haven't selected here  and watch this with my move tool, I can move it around. You see, I can kind of move it around and adjust it.

It's like a little window. Likewise, the image  underneath can be moved around. The box around can be moved  around to find where you need to go. Now, what you wanna be careful of,  if you wanna move them both together, you need  to hold command down and click them both. Okay? With them both selected, I can move them around.

Now if you wanna move them around permanently together,  well not have to select them both  as you can right click these two. Okay? After the selected,  and there's one in here that says link layers. You see there's a little linking icon appears. Just means that if I have,  say my background back here selected, and then I go back  and click just one of these two guys,  you can see just one of them selected. They both come along for the  right 'cause they're being linked.

If you need to unlink them, right, click them. And there's one in here that says unlinked layers. I'm gonna leave my link for the moment.