Practical masking application

It is now time for the application of everything we have discussed in the chapter so far. We will see how we can actually utilize these techniques in an edit. This will show you that even at this early stage, you have more skills and more power than you think.

While we introduced the existence and the masking of things such as the Adjustment and Live Filter layers in previous chapters, it is impossible in the book to go through every Adjustment layer and every Live Filter layer, so we will explore a few of the most frequently used in this section.

The edits in this section are cumulative, meaning they will be built on the topics covered in the previous sections, so you already have all you need to do this work.

The edit breakdown

In this edit, we will use six layers:

• A vector mask – A Curve layer
• The Live Filter layer – Gaussian Blur
• The Adjustment layer – Exposure
• The Live Filter layer – Sharpen...