Photoshop Tutorial: Using a clipping mask & blending mode to create new clothes texture

By Jennifer Farley | Jan 8 2008 |

In this short tutorial, I’m going to take a look at using a clipping mask in Photoshop, to constrain the visibility of one layer to that of the area of the layer underneath it, and how to use a layer blending mode to add extra realism.

I’ve opened up an image of a woman with a check style dress on.

Using the quick mask, I made a selection of just the dress.
Copy the selection onto a new layer by pressing Ctrl + J (windows) or Cmd + J (Mac). The layers palette looks like this:
I picked up a few textures from Image After (a great website for free images of textures) and I pasted this one - http://www.imageafter.com/image.php?image=b19metals050.jpg into my Photoshop file, so that the red garage door covered all of the dress.
To create a clipping mask, press Ctrl + Alt + G (windows) or Cmd + Option + G (Mac). This uses the dress layer as a clipping mask for the red garage door layer at the top.
Now, to make it a little more interesting and authentic have a play around with some of the blending modes on the Layers palette.

clipping mask 1

I liked how the linear burn looked best for this example, but it’s a good idea to run through all the blending modes as they can give very different results depending on the images used.

clipping mask 1