how get out of Masking interface in Photoshop

[gnurotic]

I opened an image in Photoshop and tried to do the select subject mask. It didn't mask everything I wanted and the add-to-mask didn't seem to work like it does in Lightroom Classic, so I tried to go back to the beginning but I couldn't get out of the interface it puts up for masking. There was no de-select, revert, or any way I could think of to get out of what you see in the attached screen shot.  

What am I missing here?

[Conrad C]

This is a weird one we see sometimes. The problem (not your fault) is that the Select and Mask workspace options accidentally got hidden, because the Properties panel that contains them got collapsed. As shown in the demo below, what you want to do is click to expand the Properties panel so that you can once again see the Cancel and OK buttons, and then you can get out of the Select and Mask workspace.

Even when the Cancel and OK buttons are not visible, you can still get out using their keyboard shortcuts: Press Esc for the Cancel button, and press Enter or Return for the OK button.

Also, that’s right, masking in Photoshop works different than in Lightroom Classic. Photoshop uses a traditional masking model that goes back at least 25 years, used in many pixel-editing applications. Lightroom Classic and Adobe Camera Raw use a much newer masking model that fits the nondestructive nature of those applications. I have to admit that even though I have used Photoshop masking for many years and am very comfortable with it, I really like and often prefer how it works in Lightroom Classic.

You can add to, subtract from, intersect, and do other clever things with masks in Photoshop, it just works enough differently enough than Lightroom Classic that you do have to study and learn it all over again. But it is worth it to know both ways, because again, how masks work in Photoshop is traditional and also used in other image editing and video editing applications, even in many applications not made by Adobe. Because the Photoshop way is much older and more widely used, there are also quite a few things you can do with Photoshop masks that are not possible with current Lightroom Classic masking.