From the course: Photoshop for Designers: Color

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Work with transparency

Work with transparency - Photoshop Tutorial

From the course: Photoshop for Designers: Color

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Work with transparency

- To distinguish between opaque pixels and transparent pixels, Photoshop displays transparency as a checkerboard. If I want to cut this image out from its background I need transparency. On the Channels panel, I have a presaved alpha channel that I made earlier. I'm going to load this as an active selection by Command + Clicking on the alpha channel thumbnail. Next, I'll return to my Layers panel and I'm going to make this active selection into a layer mask by clicking on the add layer mask icon. And we see that what was formerly sky, is represented as a checkerboard. To retain the transparency in this image, I need to save it a a Photoshop, that is a psd file. File, Save As, and you can see that when Photoshop is the format, we have the option of saving the layers, as well as the alpha channels. But in this case, it's the layers that are important. If I change this to jpeg, we see that neither layers nor alpha channels can be saved with the file. And the area that we saw as…

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