These are the best 8 Gimp online courses, classes, tutorials with a certificate. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.Improve your Gimp graphic design skills. GIMP Tutorial - Layer Masks (text & images) by Pat David. The original tutorial this was adapted from may be found here (possibly with updated information).

Getting Around in GIMP - Luminosity Masks & Split Toning.Simple Selective Colorization Example (painted with gray vs. If I wanted a slightly more muted color I could have painted with a more middle gray vs. black: Of course, I could have chosen a different color than black to create the mask. To illustrate what was done, here is the layer mask I painted to achieve the above result: This allowed those colors to show through from the layer below.

Using the Paintbrush Tool I painted over his shirt and head. This time, rather than filling selections, we are going to use the Paintbrush Tool to paint areas of the image we want the color to show through from the layer below. At this point, the Layers dialog should look like this:Īs before, set your foreground color to black. From the menu:įollowing the steps above, add a layer mask to the desaturated layer and initialize it to White (full opacity). Start the process by duplicating the base image (Shift+Ctrl+D, or Right-Click layer → Duplicate Layer).

I’ll walk through how to easily do this with an image from Mardi Gras 2013: Selective Colorization Example ¶Ī good example of the application of layer masks is doing selective colorization of an image (selectively allowing color to show through a mostly black and white image). If you examine the layer mask, you’ll see that there are different levels of gray being applied (black to white, from top to bottom), and their value is what determines the opacity of the layer. For example, I will select a few different regions of the mask, and fill it with different levels of gray: If you Rectangle Select a different area of the mask, you can fill it in with a different shade of gray to produce a variable opacity. As soon as you do, you’ll be presented with a new view of your image on the canvas:Īs you can see, filling the selected portion of the layer mask with black resulted in that area having 100% transparency, showing the layer below it. You can now click inside the selection to fill it with the foreground color (black). I am going to use the Rectangle Select tool to select roughly the top third of the image, and I’ll fill this selection with black. To illustrate how masks can affect its layers transparency, let’s paint! Modifying a Layers Transparency with the Mask ¶Īt this point any operations performed on the canvas will apply to the mask and not to any layers themselves. It is also active (there is a white border around the thumbnail in the dialog, but is not visible due to the mask being white as well) and ready for modification. The layer mask has now been added to the “Teal” layer. Layers dialog with mask applied to Teal layer. You should notice a change in your Layers dialog now that shows the layer mask thumbnail to the right of the layer it applies to (in this case the “Teal” layer): The option to initialize to Black shows that the mask will make the entire layer fully transparent.įor the purposes of this tutorial, we will let the mask initialize to White (full opacity). Notice that the first option is to set the entire mask to White, which will result in full opacity on the layer (no transparency from the mask). There are many options for initializing the Layer Mask. This will then bring up the “ Add a Mask to the Layer” dialog with some options: You can also add a layer mask through the menus: Right-Click on the layer you want to add a mask to (the “Teal” layer in my example), and the Context menu will show an option to Add Layer Mask…: The teal layer is the active layer (look for the white border), and the one which we will add a layer mask to. There is a base image at the bottom of the stack, and a single layer of teal over it. The process for adding them is simple.įor this example I will use a simple image with only two layers, as shown above. Layer masks need to be added to a layer before they can be used. This flexibility to define the opacity of different areas of a layer is the basis for more interesting image manipulation techniques such as selective coloring and luminosity masking. This modification of a layer’s transparency through a mask is non-destructive to the layer itself. This differs from the use of the layer Opacity slider as a mask has the ability to selectively modify the opacity of different areas across a single layer. They allow you to selectively modify the opacity (transparency) of the layer they belong to. Layer masks are a fundamental tool in image manipulations.

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