Please forgive me for not really knowing how to properly ask about this...
I have a photograph that I want to break up into 3 different layers; something like background, near foreground, and deep foreground. I want to separate them so that I can independently adjust effects on the different layers, and so that I can insert additional elements in between the layers.
I know that the Selection Brush is great for chunking off the bits that I want in each layer. I started banging away with the Selection Brush and a Mask, but it quickly got unruly trying to tweak the Masks across 3 different layers.
I'm fantasizing about some way to do something like having a single mask with multiple colors, where each color is the mask for a different layer... Or something like that. Just some way to manage the boundaries in a single place, rather than across 3 different masks as I was originally starting to do.
Is my question making sense? I searched around for "compositing" and "layer separation" and "background removal" and "rotoscoping", but nothing seemed to address the problem I'm having. There's a good chance I'm just not asking the right questions here.
Is there a trick to this? My naive approach has me managing 3 different masks, and trying to keep them all in sync when I want to adjust a boundary seems like a daunting task. I feel like there must be a better way. I don't need a step-by-step tutorial, I'm just hoping that someone could get me pointed in the right direction.
Thanks for any guidance.
