Layers: The Complete Guide to Photoshop’s Most Powerful Feature

Making One Layer Fit Into Another

FORCING THE CONTENTS OF ONE LAYER TO FIT INSIDE THE CONTENTS OF ANOTHER LAYER

There’s another masking feature that comes in really handy. It’s called a clipping mask, and it’s another type of mask that we use with layers. Its main purpose is letting you use a shape on one layer to mask layers above it. Clipping masks have a ton of good uses, but one great example is creating some type of card—be it a credit card, membership card, or gift card.

Step 1: Create a New Blank Document

We’ll kick this one off by creating a brand new blank document. Click on the File menu and choose New (or just press Command-N [PC: Ctrl-N]). In the New dialog, type the size of the final image you want to create. In this example, I’ll ...