Subtitles of the Movie

I want to talk about some of the features of the Channels palette. And of course, if you are not seeing the Channels palette, you need to bring that up on screen by going to the Window menu and choose Show Channels. As I mentioned before, the Channels palette is where Photoshop stores all your channel information, and the color information that makes up your composite color image. Of course currently we are looking at an RGB image, and that is a 3-channel image. Even though it looks like we are looking at four channels, the top channel (RGB) is actually a composite of these three channels. Any extra channels on the Channels palette are mask channels, and it can be saved out if you choose the appropriate file types - such as a TIFF or Photoshop file type. I have a selection active - I want to show you that. Here's my selection. I can save this selection as a mask, and when I do that, it's automatically saved to the Channels palette. I can go to Select menu and choose Save Selection. And it'll ask me if I want to name this selection or what not. The fast way of doing it is clicking on this icon at the bottom of the Channels palette. What this icon means is save any selection as a new mask through the Channels palette. There it is - there is my chicken shaped selection, and it automatically names it. It names it in this case, Alpha1. A synonym for mask is also an alpha channel. Of course if you want to edit a mask, you need to select it. So click on its name, and here's the mask channel we would be editing now. We could use any of our editing tools, such as selection tools or brushes - just make some quick edits here. I'll reselect the RGB by clicking on its name, so that's what we would be editing. And I can activate any mask as a selection by clicking on it. Clicking and dragging down to this icon, which says activate a mask as a selection. And you can see, it looks a little bit different from when I started. If you want to create a mask from scratch, simply click on this icon, which will create a new channel - and of course in this case it will create a new mask channel. And here's our new channel - alpha2. It's completely black or protected. I want to show you some of the options we have available to us from the Palette menu over here in the corner here. Press and hold, and you can see what we can do here. We can create a new channel, the same thing as clicking on this icon. However it does give us a few more options. Allows you to give it a name and choose whether or not the color is a masked area or (a) selected area. And it also allows you to change your indicator color and opacity. Well, why would you want to do that? I'm going to go back to RGB, and notice that in RGB my chicken here is essentially red in nature. Sometimes you'll want to see a channel, a mask channel information in conjunction with your image. And when you want to do that, click on the eyeball right here. So you can see that I'm really editing RGB. But now I'm also seeing my mask channel as well. And the way that Photoshop shows that to you is through this indicator color. So wherever it's red, it's actually black on my mask, and wherever it's transparent, it's white. And you can see that right here. And that's called the indicator color. And for something like a red chicken, you might want to change your indicator color to something more contrasting such as blue. So you can double click on that, and click on the color swatch and change it to blue. Now it might be easier to see in conjunction with your red chicken. So, I'm going to select this chicken mask, and we could also duplicate a channel. And it's going to ask you basically the same thing. Do you want to give it a name? And where do you want to add it? Do you want to add it to this current document, or do you want to create a new document with this channel? You could also choose to delete the channel, and that would be the same thing as selecting it, by clicking on its name, and I'll click on alpha2 to delete that one, and clicking on the trashcan icon. And when you do that it brings up this dialog box asking you if you really want to do that, and I'll say yes. You could also click and drag that down to the trashcan. If you wanted to duplicate this channel, click and drag that down to the new channel icon, and it'll create a copy of it. Another option we have is creating Spot channels, and this is a way to create a spot color on your printed document. So, I'm going to hit Cancel for a moment and select my RGB document, and choose New Spot Channel. And here is my spot color, and I also have a option for solidity value. I'll show you what this does. The idea here is that when you print this document on say an offset press, this spot color would be an additional color plate. So we would have a CMYK plate for my color data, the chicken, and then we'll have an additional plate, where we can add some more ink - say a spot color or varnish to your printed piece. So when you double click on your spot color, and you have some options for it, you might want to change the solidity depending on what kind of ink type you would be using. Notice that my red color here is fairly transparent. And you might choose this if you were using a varnish, so that just this area was more glossy or shiny. But if you were using a metallic ink, you might want a solidity of 100%. And I should also mention that the gray value of your spot color, of course determines how much ink is laid down in your spot color area. You can also merge your spot channel, and it'll just apply this color effect on to your RGB image. You can see what it has done there. So now this would separate out if you converted your image to CMYK. I'm going to undo that, because I don't like that red mark. And I'll delete my spot channel by dragging it down to the trashcan icon. I mentioned how you can split channels in the movie on grayscale documents. This of course will create three different grayscale images for each one of my color channels. And if you had a collection of split channels, you could use Merge Channels as well. The last option we have is the ability to change out thumbnail size on the Channels palette. Sometimes it is pretty nice to see large channels, and I would like to show that if I'm demonstrating how channels work. Or if you have several masks, you might want to have a smaller icons here. Sometimes if you have several different masks and channels, or if you don't really need Photoshop to render these, you can choose none and it'll just show you the text of the channel name. So it's a pretty powerful palette and I use this a lot, and I use this in conjunction with my Layers palette.