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Welcome to this lesson painting, masking things with painting the paintbrushes. I've left the previous lessons material up here just to illustrate something totally unrelated to painting and masking and that is getting rid of a mask or backing out of it. If you don't want to press Undo or if you've gone too far or saved the image and you want to come back, sometimes weird things happen. So if I want to delete this mask and press delete what it's going to ask me is would I like this mask merged with the layer below it and if I press yes essentially what that does is it's created a semi-transparent layer that if I drag it out of the group layer that's what it is. Well I don't want that. But if I want that effect layer just as it was only not with the mask. So if I Undo back to get to this point what I can do since I can't seem to drag it out, that's a weird thing too. Sometimes you can't drag these layers out of groups and that's because there's a background layer here and it's a group of the mask and other just weirdness OK? I'm just going to create a new raster layer, put it in this group and now I'm going to drag my effect layer out to the top here which should work. I need to put that raster layer below my mask, there we go. So once I created that new raster layer, put it below the mask now I can drag my effect layer out and then simple select the group and delete it. OK, that's a long and involved process for backing out of a mask. Sometimes you'll find that you've got to do that and trouble shoot things and you don't really know why or it gets confusing and it even happens to me and that's why I put that in this video. Alright I'm going to reset all my tools here and we're going to look at creating a mask and using our painting tools to work with that. So here's my effect layer that I've created contour effects for my effects menu, artistic effects, contours and I thought that was a nice way to present the background and I want to mask Grace out of this layer so that she shows through from the background. The way I do that is I got my effect layer selected, create a new mask layer, show all and now I'm ready to paint areas that I want to mask out of this layer called effects. Always make sure that mask layer is selected. You'll notice you're presented with a grayscale palette here with black being the most opaque hiding value and then white is the most transparent revealing value. So I can press my Paintbrush, change its size, we'll leave opacity at 100 percent now and with black selected in the foreground of stroke properties I can start painting which essentially means I'm painting black on my mask layer which then masks that out. And sometimes it really gets confusing trying to keep all these terms straight because it looks like I'm revealing something doesn't it, it doesn't look like I'm hiding something and that's because what you're seeing pop through is the background. That's why when I paint this black color on this mask it looks like I'm uncovering something and the truth is I am, I'm uncovering the background layer by masking out the effect. When I minimize that group you can see that, that effect layer is in this group with the mask and that's what's being hidden, just the part where I paint over. So if I use my paintbrush I can do this very quickly and abruptly or I can take my time and zoom in and out and get just an exact mask. Now one reason why I love using masks is let's say I make a mistake and I was like well I messed that out, what I can do is switch over to my white with a paintbrush and just paint back around her so that in effect erases the mask. Now I can switch back to black. Let's say I want to reduce the brush, zoom in here and get better borders let's say around her hair. Now another interesting thing about painting is, let's say I've got my swap materials here, so white is in the foreground, black is in the background. I can now use my paint brush to basically paint white here or I can use my eraser to paint black. Your eraser essentially paints the background color onto this mask. So instead of switching back and forth over here you can switch between your paintbrush and the eraser. Now what you can also do is select partial color there in between black and white and see what that does, that essentially gives you a semi-transparent mask to whatever degree you have selected here in the color palette. Darker grays will tend to be more, they will hide more and lighter colors of gray, lighter shades will reveal more and again I'm revealing this effects layer. Alright I think we can wrap this lesson up, that is how to use and some of the techniques I use when I'm using my paintbrushes and creating masks.