Photoshop: Fade Layers

A quick trick to create a fading effect on photoshop layers.
Català - Castellano
This is a bit off topic, but since Photoshop is one of the main tools we use to present what we first draw or model i think it is not completely out of place.
The fading effect for a layer is a very successful effect when making presentations. We might want to fade an image that we have to blend into another one or simply to make it disappear gradually.
The process is very simple. I´ll use a picture I took last week in Toronto.
I want the picture to fade till disappear. We need to add a layer mask. What we need to do is to select the layer we want to fade and click on the button shown in the image below.This will add a layer mask to the layer we want to fade. A layer mask is basically a transparency map for the layer it is applied to. Once we create the layer mask we will see this:
The layer mask is completely white by default, which means that all the image is set to opaque. If we want to fade the image we must add a gradient from white to black to achieve the fading effect we are looking for. Be sure that you have the layer mas selected and not the layer itself.
In this case I add a circular gradient to make the image fade equally from a center point to the edges. This is the gradient applied to the layer mask:And this is the result

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