User Guide

Corel Painter 225
A channel — before and after inversion.
Editing Channels
A channel allows certain types of
editing not possible in a selection.
You can paint in a channel or apply
effects to it. Feathering a channel
softens the transitions between light
and dark areas.
You can also fill a channel with a color,
pattern, gradient, or weave. You can
fill an entire channel or an area of a
channel, or you can fill a channel
based on existing color. For more
information, refer to “Filling Images
Based on Color” on page119.
When you edit a channel, you are
making modifications to the channel,
and not the image. You can use shades
of gray only; no colors are available.
This is because the alpha channel is a
grayscale image, separate from the
RGB image. The resulting channel
can be used afterwards to make
changes to your image.
If you want to modify a specific area of
a channel, you can create a selection.
The current selection is available to
the RGB image and all channels. For
more information, refer to “Creating
Selections” on page 206.
Editing a channel does not affect how
the channel displays. For information
about setting the color and opacity of
the displayed channel overlay, refer to
“Setting Channel Attributes” on
page 223.
To paint in a channel:
1 On the Channels palette, display
and select the channel you want to
work with.
If you want to paint only on a
specific area of the channel, make
a selection.
2 Choose the Brush tool from the
toolbox.
3 On the Brush selector bar, choose a
brush category and variant.
The Pen and Airbrush categories
make good choices.
4 On the Colors palette, choose a
color.
Only grayscale values are available.
Black adds to the channel. White
erases from it.
When you paint in the channel,
hue is irrelevant. The channel
carries 8 bits of information and
you need only set a level in that
range. The value scale is between
black and white.
5 On the property bar, type a value
in the Opacity box, or adjust the
pop-up slider.
6 Type a value in the Size box, or
adjust the pop-up slider.
7 Paint in the document window.