Adobe Fireworks CS3 Tutorials
Pages/Layers/Masks / About Image Masking
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Subtitles of the Movie (Adobe Fireworks CS3 / Pages/Layers/Masks / About Image Masking)
In the next several movies I demonstrate a very important graphic design technique and that is Image Masks. Masks in an image editing applications are ways of protecting specific areas of your image, just as you would use masking tape when painting your house to protect your window or windowsill. A Mask consists of a gray scale channel called an Alpha Channel. It's often displayed as a colored overlay so the underlying image can be seen through the mask. I have an example of a mask that I've made from this image here in my Mask 2 example right here. Notice that I've masked out portions of the image. Here's another example in Mask 1, I've masked out areas of this image of Utah by cutting out areas in the graphic under the letters U, T, A, and H. Let me demonstrate quickly how I created these masks. So if I take my Selection tool, or Oval marquee tool and I draw out an oval on my bitmap image here, and now I copy what's underneath the image, now let's deselect that selection, and now select the bitmap and now choose from the Main menu, Edit, Paste as Mask, I now get this look. And then I change the mask from a grayscale to an alpha channel so it looks like that. The lighter areas of this image are the darker areas of the mask. Those are the areas most protected, and the more filled-in areas are the lighter areas of the mask, those areas are less protected so more of the image pops through. You can create a masked object from either a vector object, as I did here; this is called a Vector Mask, or a bitmap object, which is referred to as a Bitmap Mask. You can also use multiple objects or grouped objects to create a mask. You could also use Text objects as masks. Let's go ahead and go back here to bitmap 1, and let's copy my Utah text, then go to my Utah image, and now simply choose from the Main menu, Edit, Paste as Mask. The pasted image has a different resolution. It's asking me if I want to resample the image to match the document. Let's go ahead and not resample. And now you can see that the text lettering there has created a mask that's masking out everything but the letters from that image, giving me a nice effect here. There are a variety of different ways to apply and manage and work with your masks. So let me now move on to the next movie and demonstrate in more detail how to work with bitmap masks with Fireworks CS3.
Tutorial Information
| Course: | Adobe Fireworks CS3 |
| Author: | James Gonzalez |
| SKU: | 33836 |
| ISBN: | 1-934743-42-9 |
| Release Date: | 2008-01-25 |
| Duration: | 8.5 hrs / 93 lessons |
| Work Files: |
Yes |
| Captions: | No |
| Compatibility: |
Vista/XP/2000, OS X, Linux QuickTime 7, Flash 8 |
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