What are Masks?

Masks allow us to select a certain area of a photo.
Masks are ultimately no more than a selected area made up of two colors, black and white, plus the intermediate grays. White is the selected part, Black is the non selected part. The intermediate gray levels are transparent, in which the amount of transparency is dependent on the brightness of the gray value.
With the art of masks, the image can be used for self-selection.
We use masks to edit, hide or show certain parts of a photo.

A simple example:
First we create a copy of our Background layer. We select the newly created layer and click the “Add Layer Mask” button at the bottom of “Layers” palette.
A new white window appears right next to the icon of our picture.
We click on the white window to select it.
We select our “Brush” tool in the Toolbox and choose black as the foreground color.
We click and drag with the “Brush” Tool in our photo.
The places where you clicked and dragged is our black mask and rest is to be transparent in our picture. As you now notice in our mask, everything white is visible, and everything black is invisible.

Now we open a second picture and we drag it into the first, we drag the layer mask of the second photo below the masked layer of our first picture.

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