Opacity Masks - What can you make with them?

[zaphodeist]

I'll have to look at that Frances! That looks fun

[MarciaB]

Here it is. Tried it again, grouped, ungrouped, but it doesn't work. Maybe I'm doing something wrong...

[MarciaB]

How did you do that Frances ? The cubes on the left look like ice cubes !

Edit : Never mind, found it...

[angelize]

In this one I used 3 opacity masks to create custom shading that follows the contours of the flag. The real cool thing is by editing the opacity mask with the shape editor I was able to mold my shading!

[GerryI]

Here it is. Tried it again, grouped, ungrouped, but it doesn't work. Maybe I'm doing something wrong...

What isn't working the way you want it to? Note, that if you select all three objects using marquee select then the black rectangle and the blend will be used as the mask for the photo. If you just select the blend and the black rectangle then the blend will be used as the mask for the black rectangle.

If you are trying to use the black rectangle as part of the mask for the photo then you don't need to do this. You can simply toggle the "clipping" flag on the resulting object, e.g. delete the black rectangle, select the photo and the blend and select Arrange/Apply opacity mask, then hit Ctrl-Alt-C to toggle the clipping state of the opacity mask group. This will cause all areas of the masked object to become totally transparent outside the area of the mask object(s).

Gerry

[Soquili]

This is fun, using Opacity Masks.

The attached uses a blend between two ellipses that has a linear fill from white to black. Used with the 'gold' filled rectangle, it was applied as an Opacity mask for the jpg image of a rose I drew some years ago.

I could not resist Ctrl+Click to toy with the ellipses. This was the result.

The rose jpg was used to clipview the rectangle + ellipse blend.

[JaffDave]

I'm still playing around trying to find a common use for the Opacity masks. Maybe for flash animation or watermarking photos I guess.

[MarciaB]

Thanks Gerry, that was it !

[JaffDave]

Here's another example. I used the Opacity Mask to mask out 5 areas of the background in this image rather than using the traditional Ctrl 4 (Slice) option.

Also used colour black for the word opacity and masked this with the flowers a second time and then placed a duplicate of the flower images behind the text to achieve a nice matching background.

A guess it's an OK way of masking out backgrounds and retaining the full image within a group.

[zaphodeist]

That's a great image!