Adobe Photoshop CS3 Tutorials
Layers / Opacity and Fills
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Subtitles of the Movie (Adobe Photoshop CS3 / Layers / Opacity and Fills)
Opacity dictates how much of your pixels will show through as far as you being able to see through to the layer underneath the layer that's above it. Where as fills will dictate how much of the pixels of your layer will show through while leaving any special effects in full view. Let's take a look at how to use both of those. First of all I'm gonna grab my layers and I'm gonna just grab this guy and pull it off so to show you that I have this tech layer here with some of effects applied which I turned all of them off and with this tech layer on top of the background layer what I can do to show or hide more of that layer is to click where it say opacity. Now since I'm on a tech layer let me go ahead and twirl down the effect so we can just focus on the two layers. Now what I'm gonna do is go where it says opacity and I can either manually enter a number here and type it or I can use a slider and as I move the slider further and further down the layer becomes more and more see through. So we can go all the way to zero and of course not see that layer at all which is the same thing of course as hiding it. But what we can do is if we turn that all the way back to 100 percent we can now dictate now how we can uh put a special effect on it and hide the pixels still while maintaining the uh fill and that's where this comes in handy. If you see this uh fill here at 100 percent and you go all the way to the end it still will hide the pixels but the difference is if we put a special effect on it using our styles here what we can do is make sure that those show. Now what I'm gonna do is out these back on so I'll double click where it says drop shadow to open up our layer styles and I'm gonna turn them back on and then I'm gonna show you what that looks like. So we have the drop shadow and I'll go ahead and just move that over a little bit manually and I'll grab my drop shadow and move it over. We have our inner shadow. We have an outer glow. We have an inner glow and we can add all kinds of stuff to it. We can just keep going crazy and what we can do at this point is click OK and then once again what I'm gonna do is twirl that down and then I'm gonna go to opacity and show you what happens when we use opacity. It will dim everything including your special effects and as you can see it's not really a special effect at all. It looks pretty washed out but if you really want to make something stand out add your special effects and then use this guy here. Now fill is gonna lock in on these pixels here, the blue that we added earlier to change the color of this text. So I'm gonna put fill and I'm gonna put it down to about 50 percent and look what happens the special effect isn't affected at all as a matter of fact I can turn the fill down all the way. Once again its affecting the pixels that are the type uh color in the type and it leaves the uh special effect completely alone and that's how you can get some really cool special effects. So just to reiterate the uh opacity will effect the pixels on everything on your layer as opposed to the fill which will affect the pixels while leaving any of your layer styles completely in tact. Of course you could still do a combination of both of them so if, if you want to have you know both of them on and you wanna put the opacity while still putting the fill down you can do that if you so desire but you can get a, a more dr, dramatic effect of course by leaving the opacity pretty high up while leaving your fill zero while you have all your special effects applied.
Tutorial Information
| Course: | Adobe Photoshop CS3 |
| Author: | Dwayne Ferguson |
| SKU: | 33782 |
| ISBN: | 1-933736-98-4 |
| Release Date: | 2007-08-02 |
| Duration: | 9 hrs / 161 lessons |
| Work Files: |
Yes |
| Captions: | No |
| Compatibility: |
Vista/XP/2000, OS X, Linux QuickTime 7, Flash 8 |
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