Layer Masks

Wow, we’re already to the third and final installment of our Super Groovy Wallpaper project. Let’s dive right into the video, shall we?

Well, that was fun! What have we learned?

Gradients

Gradients are a way to fill an area with a nice blend from one color to another. You can even put several colors into the same gradient, and blend them all together.

More about drop shadows

We’ve already learned one way to put a drop shadow under text. Here we used a different method to make one. An important lesson to take from this is that there’s almost always more than one way to get what you’re after. You might find multiple ways to do the same effect. Don’t be afraid to experiment. It’s fun.

Layers and locking the alpha channel

We duplicated layers, we applied layer masks, and we locked the alpha channel on a layer. The alpha channel is just a fancy way to say “transparency.” When you lock the alpha channel, the transparent areas of that layer won’t be affected by whatever editing you do to that layer. It’s a very handy feature and it was mighty useful when we made that drop shadow.

Thanks for checking out this tutorial. Like always, I’d love to hear from you.

“Beware the Ides of March.” – The Seer in William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar.

Did you remember to set your clock forward?

Alright, here we go with part 2! If you need to catch up, check out part 1 here. There’s lots of fun, new stuff to learn today. A big part of today’s lesson is about:

Adding a layer mask is a great way to control the opacity of portions of a layer. We have all that plasma cloud on one layer, but we only want the colors from that to show up on our letters. So we use a layer mask to make the parts around the letters disappear. The online Gimp documentation explains a little bit more about layer masks:

A transparency mask can be added to each layer, it’s called Layer mask. A layer mask has the same size and same pixel number as the layer to which it is attached. Every pixel of the mask can then be coupled with a pixel at the same location in the layer. The mask is a set of pixels in gray-tone on a value scale from 0 to 255. The pixels with a value 0 are black and give a full transparency to the coupled pixel in the layer. The pixels with a value 255 are white and give a full opacity to the coupled pixel in the layer.

So, here’s the video of what we did:

Another important lesson I learned today is that I still have a lot to learn. I sure do appreciate you stopping by to see what I’m doing. If you have a minute, please leave a comment and say hello.