To hide or reveal the portions of a photo, the technique of image masking service is used. It is quite an advanced technique that is available in Adobe Photoshop and used widely by image editing experts and photographers etc. In the context of image manipulation, image masking is the most advanced technique after clipping path. Let’s read in detail about image masking:

Clipping Mask

Clipping masks are there to determine the visibility or transparency of another layer using one layer. In this technique, a layer is placed at the bottom of the layer which you want to apply the transparency. Using the bottom layer, the visibility of the above layer is controlled. If the bottom layer has some pixels, the top layer will be visible and if the bottom layer doesn’t have any, then the top layer will be invisible.

Layer Masking

This is the type of mask which is the most commonly used masking in Photoshop. By controlling the opacity of the various portions of the image, parts are being hidden or revealed. To change the visibility of a layer, layer masking comes in handy and if black color is painted on the mask, that area will look transparent.

Alpha Channel Masking

This type of masking is used when you have to deal with hard edges like fur, hair, water splash, threaded areas or anything complex like that. It is the only way to deal with such images because selecting such areas is very time consuming and difficult task which cannot be achieved with the above masking techniques.

Need of Image Masking

To erase the unwanted areas of the image, it is important and necessary. Also, changes can be made later on to fine tune the masks and in the post processing phase, image masking is applied to remove the unnecessary portions. Cutting out an object is not that easy if the background is complex or the object contains fine edges. For that purpose, image masking technique is hard to avoid.

Other than that, image masking is applied on the translucent objects. For example, if you want to remove the background of a muslin cloth, image masking is quite useful.

With image masking, we can create beautiful collages. A nice use of brushes is made with a combination of gradients and effects that make the pictures look really eternal.

Conclusion

So what are you waiting for? Go ahead and find endless possibilities with image masking technique that can shape your imagination process. Attain mind blowing results with image masking and take your business to a whole new level. It is a creative technique though!