Subtitles of the Movie

Alpha channel has a weird name but it's simply a way to draw your own level of transparency which will tell Photoshop what parts of your image you want protected and what parts you want to be affected by a special affect. Let me give you an example here, I'm gonna go to channels and show you that by default we have our red, green, and blue for this image and this is our red channel, this is our green and this is our blue and whenever you click on the RGB the top one all of the channels are loaded so we can see our composite of the channels combined. I'm gonna click right here to create a brand new channel and by default it's called Alpha one I'm gonna double click here and rename this blur. Now what I'm gonna do is I'm going to draw with the gradient tool a gradient which is going to go from as you see here black to white which is the foreground to background indicated by my swatches here. So I gonna click and move me mouse right about so and then when I load this channel, first of all let me go back to RGB and show you what happens here. I'm gonna load this channel and turn RGB back on. You can see that the area that's going to be affected will be this top area and why is that because the area up here in this gradient is white the black area will be unaffected by our special affect. You can also see this in a quick mask mode by turning the eyeball on. So we can get a more visual cue as to what's going to happen. So the top of the head is unprotected, the red areas are protected, OK. So that's a quick a quick way of seeing that. Let's return now to our layers and I'm going to move this over for now. I'm gonna go to filter I'm gonna choose blur and I'm gonna choose motion blur. You move this over and as you can see the top part is the exposed area or the part of the gradient that was white. I'm gonna change my angle and I'm gonna also decrease the amount of distance here and now click OK. So an alpha channel can be very handy when you want to tell Photoshop exactly what parts of the image you want affected by something and what parts of the image you want protected. Let me once again go to channels just to reiterate, this is our channel that we created. The white part is the part that special affects will be applied to, the black part is the protected area and we can always see what that's going to look like with a visual cue with the eyeball on when we have the RGB component completely on like so. If you don't want the alpha channel anymore just throw it right in the garbage.