Advanced Techniques
By kalasnikov471
If you've managed to keep up with me it means you're getting the hang of it. But now let's get a bit more complicated.
Let's say we have a picture that we want to use in a briefing but we want to make some areas of it transparent. Here is the picture that we will be using, it's the soviet logo at a diameter of 477x549 pixels so we will have to resize it later. It is better to work with higher resolution, undersized images, in this case.
Once you have got the picture into Photoshop®:
1. Select the Magic Wand Tool in the tool bar by clicking and holding the "Quick Selection Tool" icon until a menu appears and then selecting "Magic Wand" (see picture).
2. If the file is not in RGB format, convert it. (Select Image/Mode/RGB Colour).
3. Once you have selected the Magic Wand Tool click on the yellow part of the picture which will select it.
4. Then add a new channel. (see image).
The alpha channel has been created. If you did everything correctly you should have exactly the same as is in this screen shot here, if not you've done something wrong.
Now we don't want the area outside of the yellow shape to be visible we only want the shape itself to be visible, so we will leave the area outside of the shape black which means 100% transparent.
5. Change the colour to white or 0%. (see picture).
6. Now select the Paint Bucket Tool and click anywhere inside the shape to change its colour to white which will make it 0% transparent.
Note: It is recommended that you save your work as a .tga file, before you go to the next step!
