Hi Folks, this little How 2 is for those who have never played with the alpha channels,

Think of it like this, You are an airbrush artist, you want to put a coating on your canvas that will protect it. Then you can remove areas of the coating where you want to put some paint. Alpha= a mask with any name you choose to put in place of alpha.

Channels, lets see..... its like watching TV, if you want to see something different you change channels. So if you want to use a different mask you switch to that alpha channel.

Using the channels gives you the capability to draw and edit a mask with pinpoint accuracy down to the pixel with any of Photo paints drawing tools, if you use grayscale on a mask it will have shading capabilities like a screen, you can apply filters and effects to them, you can use a single mask to create multiple copies of an object, if you import black and white or grey scale vector art into Photo paint you can use it to make a mask, you can make a bunch of them to use at your disposal over and over, you can save them to disk, etc..etc....


So to get started, open Photo paint. I'm using Photo paint 7 but it shouldn't matter

[This message was edited by Mike Bailey on March 08, 2002 at 04:01.]