User Guide

Chapter 5: Painting And Image Editing
areas of the image. To create transparent areas from the selection, you need to invert the
channel.
3. Press Esc to deselect the selection in the image. Then, click the alpha channel in the
Channels palette to make it active.
4. Choose Image | Adjust | Invert. This reverses the white and black areas in the channel.
5. Drag the alpha channel into the Channel Mask slot in the Channels palette. Black areas in the
channel mask produce transparent areas in the image. White areas in the channel mask
produce opaque areas in the image.
6. Press Esc to exit image edit mode. The selection you made is now transparent. If you place
the paint object on a background in your document, the background will be visible through
the transparent areas of the image.
To create a transparency fade:
Create a transparent fade effect using a channel mask. This procedure explains how to create a blend
in an alpha channel, and then create a channel mask to make an image fade to transparency.
1. Choose Image | Show Channels to open the Channels palette. Double-click a paint object to
put it in edit mode.
2. Click the New Channel button in the Channels palette. A new alpha channel appears in the
palette. Click the channel to make it active.
3. Select the Blend tool. With the foreground color set to white and the background color set to
black, drag vertically from top to bottom in the channel. This creates a blend from white to
black.
You can change the distance that you drag the Blend tool in the channel to adjust the
length and position of the fade to transparency.
You might need to use the Blend settings in the Properties bar to select the Linear option
for the Blend tool before you create the blend in the alpha channel. You can also set other
options for the Blend tool to fine-tune blends.
4. Drag the alpha channel into the channel mask slot in the Channels palette. White pixels at the
top of the channel produce opaque areas. Black pixels produce completely transparent areas.
Gray pixels in the channel mask correspond with partially transparent areas in the image.
To create a channel mask by rendering:
Canvas can create a channel mask when you render a vector, group, paint, or text object.
To create the mask, choose the Mask and Transparency options in the Render dialog box. Canvas
will create a channel mask that makes blank areas around and inside the objects transparent.
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