Photoshop - masking with gray

Another followup for lou_harper ! I like things like glasses because they give me a chance to really make the subject look integrated. It's also an opportunity to be creative with the layer mask. When painting on a layer mask "white reveals, black conceals" but you can get a lot of mileage out of your gray tones, which result in transparency in your mask.

Normally I'd mask out the glasses lens with a very dark gray, however in this instance the lighting source right behind the lens looked like it needed to really shine through at full strength. I did get fancy masking the ARM of the glasses, though, which was translucent. I hand-painted a gray strip to allow the background color to partially come through.

The reflections in his lenses were picking up color from the gradient overlay so those blended in to the composition without a problem. I will actually be adding subtle reflection in cover #7 because due to the angle of the model's head, the frames look empty to me, and Paul's glasses are his trademark.