Cool Grungy Mask Effect for Your Photos in Photoshop

Create a Cool Grungy Dispersion Effect for your Photos in Photoshop

In this tutorial I will show you how to create this cool Grungy Dispersion effect in Photoshop using Photoshop CC 2019 & above.

This tutorial was created in CC2020, however, this effect can be achieved in any version of photoshop using the techniques outlined in this tutorial.

Download the PSD

Let’s break this tutorial down:

1. Getting Your Photo

2. Setting Up Your Photo

3. Getting a Brush

4. Experiment

Step 1. Getting Your Photo

You can download the photo here

Feel free to use your own photo as well.

Once you’ve got your photo, you need to open the photo in photoshop. Add a Solid Color adjustment layer and choose white as the color.

Step 2. Setting Up Your Photo

With your photo selected, click on the mask icon at the bottom of the layers panel (3rd from the left)

Your mask would appear white.

With the mask selected, press CTRL or CMD + I on the keyboard to invert the mask and make it BLACK. Doing so your PHOTO SHOULD DISAPPEAR

Step 3. Getting a Brush

This effect will work with any brush, but, because I wanted a “Grungy” look, I’ve selected the default Special Effects Brush – Kyle’s Spatter Brushes – Supreme Spatter

This set comes default with Photoshop CC 2019 and above. However, lower versions of photoshop also have plenty of spatter brushes and special effects brushes too.

Set the Opacity of the Brush to 100%

Now that we have our brush selected, make sure the foreground color is set to WHITE. Press D on the KEYBOARD to set the foreground color to WHITE.

Make sure the MASK is selected for your photo layer

Paint with your Brush over the photo and you should see parts of your photo being brought back into the canvas. Pretty Cool, huh?

Continue the painting process till you reach a result you are happy with. If you feel you’ve done too much and would like to erase certain parts of the photo then you need to start painting with BLACK instead of WHITE. This is exactly how masks work.