4 Drag the alpha channel into the Channel Mask slot in the Chan- nels 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. 5 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 transpar- ent areas of the image. To create a transparency fade You can 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 dialog box to select the Lin- ear 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 Chan- nels 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. Drag a channel into the Channel Mask slot
Canvas 8 Help: Selections and channels (29 of 32)                                                   Page #679