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How to Turn Photographic Textures Into Masks in Photoshop


The photographic texture is a major component of the design. So it is vital to learn how you can turn photographic textures into a mask like layer masks or clipping masks using Photoshop. Because it will greatly help to boost up your skills and enhance creativity.  You can modify the original image and create photoshop document with this method. Today we are going to tell you about an overly brisk and simple approach to take photographic textures and transform them into masks for photoshop users. Whether you are a beginner or advanced level user, you should learn this strategy and start utilizing it on your projects.

Step 1: Select The Channel with The Best Contrast

In order to understand why we’re going to turn to channels for this task, you need to understand the nature of a mask. A mask is a collection of grayscale pixels that affect the transparency of a layer: black means hidden, white means visible and everything in between is, well, everything in between. If the image below were a mask, each circle would equate to a different level of transparency.

We cover this topic in-depth in our beginner’s guide to masking. A channel is very similar in nature and also uses grayscale values. The cool thing here is that you can turn a channel into a selection, which of course then becomes a mask in a single click.

To start this process, click on your Channels panel and try to find the channel with the best contrast ratio. In my case, it was the blue channel.

Step 2: Duplicate The Channel

Once you find the channel with the best contrast, duplicate it. This can be done by dragging the channel to the little page looking button next to the trash can near the bottom of the Channels palette (just like copying a layer).

Step 3: Use Levels to Increase the Contrast

Select the new channel that you just created and perform a Levels adjustment that really cranks the contrast. How much you do this, if at all, really depends on the effect that you’re going for, but in this case we want to crank it.

Step 4: Turn the Channel Into a Selection

Now that you have a really good contrast ratio on a non-destructive channel, it’s time to turn this channel into a selection. This is really easy, just Command-Click (Control on a PC) on the channel and it should bring up a live selection.

So what’s happening here? The color of the pixels are being used to determine what is selected, just like we saw how they affected the mask earlier. So black pixels will not be selected but white pixels will.

Step 5: Apply the Selection as a Mask

Now that we have an active selection, you probably already know how to turn that into a mask. All we have to do is select our text layer and click the little mask button at the bottom of the Layers panel. Voila, now we have the effect that we’re going for!

Notice that this doesn’t look anything like a broken chunk of ice. In fact, you can barely tell that we used the photo at all. We’ve simply borrowed the complex pixel structure so that we don’t have to manually draw in cracks and faded areas.

If you’d like to tweak the result, try running a Levels adjustment on the layer mask and watch how it affects the end result.

Going Further

Don’t stop there! Try the effect again, mix it with different textures, throw in some layer effects, and you can really come up with something cool:

Here I added in some faded text as a background image, then copied the mask that we built before but adjusted the Levels so that it was barely having an effect. Then I applied an inner-shadow with the blending mode set to Color Burn. The result is a really dramatic, faded parchment look that’s a far cry from where we started.


Source: https://cutoutimagemedia.com/photographic-textures-into-masks/

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