David Asch

In this month's Photoshop Elements tutorial I'm going to demonstrate a neat trick for changing the view through a window. There are many ways to approach this, of course, this is a particularly versatile method, however. Instead of cutting out the glass areas of the window and putting the new view beneath, we'll use the window panes as a clipping mask. If you're unfamiliar with the concept of clipping masks, it's a way of hiding parts of a layer based on the visible areas of the layer below. In this case, only the parts of the new view will be visible where they overlap the window panes, giving the impression that we're seeing the scene behind the window frame. This is often preferable to the usual masking technique, particularly if we want to use multiple images to build the composite, where the layers would need to be beneath the target layer as we can control the visibility without the need to move the layers around in the stack. If we want to see the whole image, we simply unclip it. [More]