Styles On Masks
page one[Please note that this tutorial was written for Photoshop 6; in version 7, you do not want to double-click on the layer name to open the Layer Styles dialog. Double-click the layer to the right of (beyond) the layer name.]
I don’t know if anybody else has noticed this, but you can add styles to layer masks. So, why would you want to do that? Because styles on masks respond to luminosity instead of transparency. This means the style will react to image data within the image, not only around the edges.
Styles on masks also appear to interact differently with the layers below them, but I’ll leave it up to you to try and figure out how and why. My tiny little brain has been fried trying to understand what is and is not going on with these things.
Because I don’t fully understand why styles do what they do on masks, this tutorial is going to be long on examples, and short on instruction. You’ll need to help me out by doing a lot of experimenting on your own. I hope I can give you useful pointers to get you started in the right direction(s).
To give you a sample of what can be done with styles on masks, below you can see two examples of what I’ve come up with.
I don’t really enjoy working with styles, so any of you who are good at using them should be able to do better than I have.
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Make a new document with a white background and resolution of 72 ppi. Set your Swatches palette to Small List (via the palette menu) and click on Dark Red. Use a large, hard edged brush (from the top row in the brushes pop-up palette) to paint a diagonal line across your document.
Go back to the Swatches palette and click on Pastel Cyan. Use the same brush to paint a diagonal line in the opposite direction from the first so that you have created a two color "X".
At the bottom of the Layers palette, click on the Add New Adjustment Layer button. It’s the black and white circle. Choose any of the options; it makes no difference as we aren’t going to make any adjustment. I used Brightness/Contrast. In the adjustment layer dialog, make no changes. Click OK to add the layer without any adjustment.
With the new adjustment layer selected in the Layers palette, click on 30 % Gray in the Swatches palette. Paint two horizontal lines. You won’t see anything on your image since you’re painting on the mask. You can see the strokes on the mask icon in the Layers palette.
Next, click on the 70 % Gray swatch and paint two vertical lines as if you are drawing a grid. Your Layers palette should look like this:
Now, double-click on the adjustment layer’s name. Be sure and double-click the name (where the cursor is pointing in the illustration, above) and not on either of the thumbnails.
When the Layer Styles dialog opens, click on Inner Shadow on the left side of the box, and set your inner shadow to have Opacity of 100 % (so you can see it more clearly), a Distance of 14, Choke 0, and Size of 5.
In the resulting image, shown here, notice that the Inner Shadow results in an outer shadow effect. Styles often act in reverse on masks. Also note that the shadow is stronger on the darker gray stroke. Opacity is what affects the strength and location of styles on masks, not transparency (which is what governs styles on regular layers). Also note that the underlying colors are visible through the styles.
Try going back to the Layer Styles dialog (double-click the layer name) and remove the shadow (uncheck its panel on the left side of the dialog). Add an Inner Glow.
After you’ve exited the Styles dialog, in the Layers palette, change the adjustment layer’s blend mode to Color Burn. Note that you can also change the layer’s blend mode from within Layer Styles by going to the Advanced Blending panel.
In the resulting image, you can see that blend modes will mix the styles with the layer(s) below in interesting ways. However, some styles are not affected by the blend mode of the adjustment layer. You’ll have to experiment to find the ones that are. Of course, most layer effects have blend modes within the effect (accessed via the settings in the Layer Styles dialog box) which certainly do affect the style.
Okay. One more example using this very basic pair of stroked layers, and then I’ll show you some more interesting stuff.
Below, you can see what a texture effect does when applied to a mask. I used the Oak texture from the Textures.asl group (found via the Styles palette menu), and added the same Inner Shadow that I used in the first example, above.
The texture effect appears behind the dark content of the mask and allows content from the underlying layers to be visible where the mask is dark (which is what a regular layer mask does, but not what you would expect an adjustment layer mask to do).
Continue on page two
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Copyright © 2004 by Jay Arraich.
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