In this next example we’ll see how painting in shades of gray allows you to introduce transparency effects: Darker grays conceal more, lighter grays reveal more of the layer. Or put another way, the closer you move towards black, the greater the masking effect; the closer you move towards white, the more the revealing effect. 1. O...

Let’s take a look at layer mask conventions and terminology, beginning with a couple of housekeeping points: The Background layerthat layer that most Photoshop images start out withdoesn’t support transparency and thus can’t support layer masks. It sounds worse than it is: to add a layer mask to a Background layer, take the ...

Layer styles are effects like drop shadows, bevels, and glows that you can add to a layer with a single click. These effects change with the content of the layer and can be updated at any time. Layer styles fit in with our approach of nondestructive editing because while the effects are attached to a specific layer, they do not actually change ...