Subtitles of the Movie

So now I want to talk a little bit about this concept of variable levels of selection and this becomes very, very important in creating complex masks that would be virtually impossible to create in the real world and this is one of the main strengths of the computer. These are almost exclusively Raster effects, so they won't necessarily be scalable but they will be very useful to you. Now, the first thing that you need to wrap your brain around is that in the world of Channels and Alpha Channels, which are our saved selections, you have black and white and those represent selected and non-selected, but we also have all those various shades of gray that make up a grayscale image - 256 shades of gray to be precise, with black being one of those shades and white being the other. So anything that's not black and white is at a variable level of intensity depending upon where it is on the value scale. Now this sounds very technical and, of course, it is, but I'm going to go ahead and make it a little bit simpler for you. I'm going to go ahead and put a gradient in here and I'll just launch the Gradient Palette, so I'm going to keep it real, real simple and I'm just going to have a black to white gradient for right now and I'm going to drop that guy in here using the Paint Bucket Tool like so and we can just close that out for right now. So this is now an Alpha Channel and, again, if we turn this off we can see this Alpha, so not selected at all, fully selected and then everything that's in between. So how does this play out if we load this as a selection? Well, we'll just go ahead and load it as a selection and you'll see. First of all, you'll see that the Marquee only goes up to about 50 percent gray and it ignores everything else. Well, does that mean that we can't paint here? No, we can paint here, as a matter of fact and we're going to. So I'm going to show you how that works. I'll grab the Paintbrush Tool and we'll throw up a new Layer and I'm just going to go ahead and turn this off so that we can see what we're actually painting with and I'll paint with a color so that we can really see it. So, as I'm painting here you can see I'm not varying my brush stroke but I am getting a variation in the amount of paint that I'm able to put down because it's blocking me off. Even though this is past where this dotted line of the Marquee is these are partially selected pixels. These are more and more fully selected pixels as we progressively get toward the white end of that spectrum. So, we can use gradients and all their various forms that you can see in that Gradient Palette to create some very complex masks as well. We can also take these things and combine them to create even more complex masks, so what I'll do is I'll just go ahead and deselect this, then I'll use this tool here to create some various different shades on a Layer and notice I don't have Preserve Transparency or Pickup Underlying Color and I'm just going to begin creating some interesting marks here, something very, very random and not at all something that you need to be concerned about, but one of the things that, as I'm changing my colors please bear in mind that these colors may look like they would be different values of gray for selection purposes, they're not. These are either transparent or opaque or somewhere in between and that will be represented when we make our selection. So I'm going to go ahead and make our selection now and we're going to say Select, Load Selection, Layer 1 Transparency and hit OK. And now we're going to go ahead and save that as a New Channel. Hit OK. And we can just go ahead and delete that now and deselect that. So, now if we come down here and we look at this we can see, again, those colors had no impact whatsoever on what was considered selected and what wasn't. It was merely an issue of transparency. So, please bear that in mind when you're thinking about this. Color and value that you're painting with have nothing to do with the transparency of the pixels that we're going to use for our selection. But now we can create a very, very complex selection that has many different various shades of partially selected pixels when we're working with these Alphas. So the very first thing I'll do here is I'll just go ahead and Load, Alpha 1 and hit OK and now we're going to say we're going to take Alpha 2 and we're going to do something like, say, Subtract from that selection and hit OK. And now immediately you can see that these pixels here have been subtracted from that original selection and we have a very complex Marquee. Now, one of the things you may notice with these Marquees is that they are very system-processor intensive. I have a tendency to hide these so I'm just going to hide that right now and go back to our main Channel, turn this guy off and create a New Layer, and now I'm just going to begin painting and I'll zoom out a couple times just to make this more easy for us to work with. So, here we go. I'm creating - and notice, now we're getting this very, very complex mask that is both utilizing the gradient and its associated transparency as well as utilizing the transparency of the pastel mark that we were making as well and it may be immediately obvious but I can paint with anything I want in here, any tool for that matter, any color, any value, so, you know, the transparency of that masking is really very, very powerful and it's something that we'll be tapping into over and over again during the course of this training, so I wanted you to get a really good handle on this idea of Channels and Layers and Variable Opacity and Pen Tools and Vector graphics and Raster graphics, because it's the heart of how we can actually create very, very quickly, very complex artwork that we would have a difficulty doing in virtually any other way. So, I highly recommend that if you're not already familiar with these things go check out the Manuals, play with them, get a feel for how they work and you'll see me use them over and over again as we're working, but it's so important and critical for you to get comfortable with these tools in order to be able to effectively work in the computer.