Photoshop: Adding a "Matrix" Layer Mask

Video Transcript

"Now we're going to continue on with our matrix background and text. If we look at our screen here we can see we have two layers lined up like so. What we're going to do is we're just going go ahead and duplicate and add another layer, make the text just a little bit bigger so we'll just hit enter there because that's been adjusted, grab another layer here. Let's go ahead and move it and pull it off just a little bit more. Pull it down here some. And what we're going to do is we're going to bring this text up quite a bit. Let's bring this up to a twelve point text. There we go. Actually let's bring it up just a little bit bigger. Let's bring this up to an eighteen. There we go, absolutely big now. Bring it up here and actually we're just going to, we're going to mess that all up that we just typed in by grabbing, selecting and pulling it down just a little bit more. There we go. Let's go ahead and pull this down some like so. Now we've got this big jumbled mess so this isn't really going to work for us because we need something to differentiate this stuff. So what we're going to do here is we're going to do a layer mask. So what we're going to do is we're going to hit the layer mask icon at the bottom of the layers palette which is right down here, and well wait a minute, let's hit Enter on that. There we go. Now as you can see, if you don't know which one it is if you hold your icon over it it'll say add layer mask so we'll hit that like so, and what we're going to do is we're going to choose to hit D to default back to black and white. Oops let's not get out of program here. So we've defaulted to black and white and let's change that back. Now what we're going to do is the mask that we're going to use is we're going to come down here and hit render and we're going to render some clouds. There we go, and as you can see it's changed that layer mask. Now one thing that we forgot to do with the second, this third layer that we've created, was we needed to put this, actually no we'll just leave it like so. We're going to do this throughout our other layers as well. We're just going to mask out each one with a nice set of clouds. There we go, and one more, and we can hit Command F to, oops let's not do that. I forgot to add the layer mask first. Now we've got a little bit of texture going on here so we're going to stop here for now and we'll move on to the next section."