Hi there, in this video we're going to learn what a Layer Mask is, and how to create it. It's super simple, basically it's this black and white thing that goes on top of an image. The cool thing about it, it allows you to do cool stuff like this where I can move my image within the mask. I can disable the mask. It's really like copy and pasting but I have a few extra professional controls at my disposal. Let's learn how to do that now in Photoshop. 

So it's time to go back in time a little bit. We worked on a project, it is in your 'Exercise Files', under '05 Selections and Masking'. It was way back here, where we took 'Marquee Tool 01' and 'Marquee Tool 02'. I'm going to open up both of these. Before, we used our selection tool, which was really cool. We used the Rectangle Marquee Tool, and we held down 'Shift', and I got a nice big circle. It's in the right place, then I copied and pasted. 

From now on you're never allowed to copy and paste. We have to use something called Layer Mask, they're pretty easy to implement. So any sort of selection, you can use the Quick Selection Tool, the magic wand tool, or in our case, the Ellipse Marquee Tool. Instead of hitting copy, down here, it's this little icon here. So click on that, nothing really much changes, it kind of removes the background, but look at the layer structure over here. Can you see, the actual image is fine. What's happening is, there's a mask over the top, and you can see the black parts hide the background. The white hole in the middle shows us the image through. 

So there's a couple of perks for this, so we're going to use our Move Tool. Click, hold, and drag the center of it, up to our tab. Wait, wait, come down, here we go. So why is it cool? I'm going to transform this, remember, 'Command T' on a Mac, 'Control T' on a PC. I'm just going to scale it down to get it to where I want. So nothing much is different from when we did it, we're just copying and pasting. What ends up happening is, once I get the right shape, get it into the spot, hit 'Return' to get rid of my Transform. What's really nice about it is, a couple of things you can unlink. Watch this, see this little chain link here? So it means the image and the mask are actually separate. You can tell which one you're working on. Can you see the kind of dotted white line that appears when I click on them? 

So I want to work on the image. Watch this, I grab my 'Move Tool', I can move this around within my mask. To get it more aligned, I can work on the mask separately. So with the Mask Layer selected I can move the mask around. It's not what I want to do, I'm going to undo. I'm going to link them back together by clicking that empty area where that link icon was. So it gets better, we've done that change and what we can do is, with the Mask selected, you'll notice that our Properties Panel adjusts. The easiest one to start with, this is feather. Watch this, if I crank up the feather really high, can you see, over here it's kind of feathering the edge of my Mask, whereas before, when we used the Ellipse Marquee Tool, really kind of sharp edge, whereas now I've got a little bit more play here. 

I'm just going to kind of-- I don't want it to be super feathery but just a little bit more in tune with the rest of the image. It's the same basic principles as we've learnt except, we click on this button here and it giv