In this tutorial you will learn how to use Layer Masks in Photoshop. This is a very basic process but it opens a whole new set of possibilities. To demonstrate, I will be showing you step by step how I made:

Here are all of the pictures I will be using to make the above picture:

I took those by putting my camera on a tripod and setting my timer to take an exposure every 2 seconds. I bulk color-corrected the images in Adobe Camera Raw and now I am ready to open them all into Photoshop at one time. Hint: If you are using Adobe Bridge you can select all the images and go to Tools > Photoshop > Load Images into Photoshop Layers, this will save you some time.

If you do not have this option, all the pictures will be opened separately and this is what I do to get them into one image as different layers: decide what picture will be your base picture, it usually doesn't matter, and go to any other picture, Select All, Copy and then Paste on top of your base image. Then go to the picture you just pasted and close it once you are sure it is a layer on top of your base image and just repeat for every picture.

Ok now I am going to start "painting" the different pictures onto the base image. It helps if you are already familiar with Photoshop layers but this tutorial should be simple enough that pre-existing knowledge won't be necessary. Layers are used for many different reasons, so you can move objects around on top of and underneath other objects, so you can edit a specific part of something, so that you can always keep your original layer just in case you mess up, etc. Digital artists are known to use over 100 hundred layers. You can Hide/Show different layers by clicking on the eye icon to the left of the layer preview.

Go ahead and click on the eye icon to make all of the layers invisible except for the last two. Now, select the second to last layer and go to Layer > Layer Mask > Hide All.

It should be invisible now. Select the Brush (B) and make sure the color is set to white. I usually set the Hardness to about 48% and the size of the brush depends on the size of your picture. Zoom in to what you think is necessary and "paint" what you want from your hidden layer onto the base image. This is what mine looked like a bit more than halfway through, in this case it took me about 10 seconds each layer to paint:

You should consider using small brush sizes and zooming in a lot if you are trying to be very precise. Ok, now there are two of me in the frame. I'm going to go ahead and select the third to last layer and repeat what I did with the previous layer, hide the Layer Mask and paint. (make sure you make it visible again by clicking in the box where the eye was or your painting won't help you very much) Repeat this for every layer you have and you're done!

A really cool example of taking advantage of Layer Masking, cloning, stitching whatever you want to call it are the series by Matt Logue, Peter Funch and Bahbak Hashemi-Nezhad. You can see them if you click here.

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