- [Instructor] Layer masks are a key feature of Photoshop that allow us to non-destructively hide and show selected portions of our image. We can see that this document has six different images, each on its own layer. So we have a birds layer, we have the skyline of Chicago, we have some clouds, an iceberg, some smoke, and a porthole. The first thing that I want to do is I want to mask the iceberg so that it only appears within the porthole. And to do this, I'm going to first create a selection. I think the easiest way to do this would be to go to the View menu and then show our Rulers. Then from the ruler area, we can drag out guides. So I'm going to drag out the first guide at the top of the porthole, and then I'll use the ruler on the left side to drag out the guide to the left side of it. I want to drag these guides to this inner area here so that when I select the Marquee Tool, I can start at the crosspoint of those two guides. And as I drag into the image area, it's going to create a selection that's going to match that circle. Excellent. Now, it's okay if it's not completely perfect. And if you need to redraw it, you can just click in the image area and then drag it out again. All right, now in order to add the mask to the iceberg layer, I will target that layer and also make it visible in the Layers panel. And then from the Layers menu, I can choose to either add a mask that reveals all, hides all, reveals selection, or hides the selection or even from transparency. Well, since we've already made the selection, let's go ahead and select that. So now we can see in the Layers panel that Photoshop has added a layer mask. Where the mask is black, Photoshop is hiding the contents of that layer, and where the mask is white, we can see the contents of that layer in the image area. If we want to view the mask, we can hold down the Option key on the Mac or the Alt key on Windows and click in the mask. To see the image again, we can click on the eye icon. Now, if we wanted to soften the edges non-destructively, we can use the Properties panel and add a feather.

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