Subtitles of the Movie

An Alpha Channel gives you the ability to retain transparency in your artwork. Let's say for example, in this document I create a brand new layer. I'm going to hide the canvas so we can see this checker pattern. This checker pattern doesn't print. Its main purpose in life is to show you that there's nothing here. Whenever you paint on a layer, you are now adding pixels. An Alpha Channel is fully aware of the pixels on a layer and what's not covered with pixels. We can see this by going to the Select Menu and choosing load selection. Now when I simply hit okay, we see that Painter selected the pixels in the image because it was aware that there was nothing really here to select. Now the beautiful thing about an Alpha Channel is that you can use this to create artwork for the web. So if you want to create a button just like this and then place it on top of other artwork, you'll be able to do this very easily. All you have to do is know what format to save it in. So if I go to save as for example, I would save this as a .png for the web. So this button could be placed on top of another graphic or a part of your webpage that has a color behind it and that color would show completely through that transparency. It would be great. And I'm going to porove this to you by the way by opening this same file in Photoshop. So I'm going to just bring my canvas back and I'm going to go to file and I'll choose save as, and on my Desktop I'll save it as the Photoshop format and I'll call it Button. I'll choose save. And as you can see it says save Alpha. Then I'm going to launch Photoshop. Once Photoshop's ready to go, I'm going to open that same document and you'll see that the transparency has been retained because whenever you work with transparency the document will create that transparency or that Alpha Channel for you. So I'm going to go to file, open and on my Desktop I'll choose that Button graphic and there we go. I'll hide the background and we still have the ability to deal with that transparency. And I can create a layer underneath this guy. I'll just drag that under it and I could fill it with a color. Let's go ahead with something crazy like purple. And there you go. So make believe this is your webpage and it's purple. So here's the graphic and this is exactly what its going to look like. You'll be able to see right behind it. So that's how an Alpha Channel works in Painter and in Photoshop. By the way, it also works great in other applications that support transparency, like 3D applications.