In this tutorial, you will learn more about your paint brush, the sizes and how to use the flow percentage when masking your images. I am using just one image of Buffy from Episode: The Gift.

Before starting, you need to familiarize yourself with the Layers Panel. I've indicated where the short cut key to masking is with a red arrow. Once you've clicked on the icon, a white box will appear (blue arrow). It should be on the layer you're working with. Always make sure the mask icon is showing up next to the eye icon (orange arrow). If it's not there, you will be painting on your image and we don't want that.

You'll want to get your paint brush tool in the tool bar. On the tool bar there are two color boxes below: black and white. The black is the foreground while the white is the background. When I mask, I have the foreground on black. If I don't have it on black, it won't work. I don't know if this is general for everyone but it happens to me. So I'd make sure it's on black.

Once you've clicked on the paint brush tool on the tool bar, you want to go to the Menu Bar. You'll see the paint brush icon and next to it is a button that allows you to view different brush sizes and styles (red arrow). Click on it.

You can see little boxes of different brush sizes and styles. For this tutorial, I selected a soft round brush- size 45. On your own, I encourage you to play with the Master Diameter (orange arrow). You can control your own brush sizes rather than use the ones given to you.

I kept the flow percentage at 100% (red arrow- on the menu bar). You'll see the result of my masking steps with these choices. It's a bit rough. You have to judge when the right time to use the right sizes and flow.

Here, I've starten over. I am now gonna show you what happens when you use a different brush size and flow percentage. I picked 65 for my brush size and 50% for my flow percentage. You can tell the difference.

Here is another brush size to play with- I picked 100 and 18 for my flow percentage. I tend to use this often when blending my wallpaper. It doesn't take away so much from the face, etc.

In this step, I kept my brush size and flow percentage the same but played with the Opacity. I put it on 70%. I don't use this feature but it's a good access when layering. You might to use this to allow other screencaps to appear through. I have other ways to do this same concept but that's another tutorial.