Adjusting a mask

[MikeFromMesa]

I am returning to Photoshop after some years, so I find I have forgotten some of what I used to know about using Photoshop itself, and apparently one of those things is how to  view a mask when painting over part of it.

I was working on a photo of a flower and I used the object select tool to select the flower itself and created a mask from that. I then used that mask in several adjustment layers and then found I wanted to remove part of the mask to adjust only some of the flower in another adjustment layer. I selected the paint brush with black color to remove some of the mask and that worked fine, but I thought I remembered that it was possible to view the mask itself rather than the image when painting over part of a mask, but I could not find any way to do that.  That is, I wanted to view the mask rather than the image when painting over the mask, but could find no way to display the mask itself rather than the image. How do I do that?

I work on a (Silicon) Mac running Ventura. Thank you for any help.

[AxelMatt · Accepted solution]

In the Layers panel do an Option-click the layer mask thumbnail to view only the grayscale mask. To redisplay the layers, Alt-click or Option-click the layer mask thumbnail.

[MikeFromMesa]

Thank you. That worked. I thought I had tried that, but apparently I did not.

I just wanted to comment that I have been very surprised at how much more functionality I have found after returning to CC Photoshop that I don't remember from from before. Slections are much, much easier than I remember and so creatng and using masks has been a pleasure. Perhaps it is just that CC Photoshop has improved that much, or perhaps it is because I have also become more knowledgeable about what is possible over the years and more willing and able to experiment, but I have been amazed.