Unmasking the Errors of Self-Teaching
It took me until yesterday to learn the magic of Adobe Photoshop’s layer mask tool.
After nearly a decade of hobby PS use…let’s just say I’m a bit miffed about it.
Allow me to explain. Photoshop has a litany of tools (70, last time I checked), so it’s a bounty of button-mashing and knob-turning until something fun happens. And, like how rats got pellets from bad-boy behaviorist BF Skinner, I learned Photoshop through rote trial and error.
This approach afforded me many benefits to the standard Adobe user. For one, I didn’t have to meander through the woes of a software class (and pay for it!). More importantly, I got very good at the tools I understood; I know every hotkey for selection, canvas-flipping, color balancing, and painting like the back of my hand.
But self-teaching did me one massive disservice. I never learned the basics.
To me, self-teaching is all about discovery and experimentation.
It often lacks structure, going for a gardener-over-architect approach, and that’s what I love most about it. Unfortunately, no matter how beautiful a garden can be, it cannot put a roof overhead like an architect can.
I crave a lack of structure in my creative endeavors, but one needs constraints to improve. I’ve gotten so comfortable teaching myself that I forgot how structure can be faster, more comprehensive, and critically, much, much easier to work with.
Doing it all oneself is an emergent thought in every maker’s life. “I’ll just make the parts” or “I’ll just quickly learn how to do this complicated task” etc., but there is no master of every craft. Sure, Leonardo Davinci was good at playing the lute—but he was best at drawing and painting. The tendency is born in the ego and is often humbled by mistakes. Mistakes are the real teachers, though, and Ivy League ones at that. So, I learn by mistake, one painful flub at a time.
My first project, using layer masking. This was a collaboration between my PS skills and the illustrious ideas and under-sketches of my friends Cat and Zach.
Did I err by ignoring one of the most useful and simple tools in Photoshop? You bet your sweet bippy I did. But will I ever forget how it works and how amazingly time-saving and non-destructive it can be? Not a chance.
Going a decade without learning this simple tool also illustrates the many roads of creativity. Without layer masking, I had to get good at the tools I understood. Clumsy? Yes. Inefficient? Absolutely. A waste of time? Not in the slightest. Without this ignorance, I would have never developed techniques that may offer future advantages. But this could be thinly veiled coping for hours of erasing and crtl+Z’ing.
Anyways, next on the PS docket for me is the multiply tool—I heard that it will REALLY blow my socks off.