Hi everyone, let me show you how to use images... they have transparency to mask background images, and fills... this image has transparency, double wham, masking out another image... I'll show you how to do it, and then if you want to stick around... I'll show you how I made these transparent background images in Photoshop... they're nice and easy to make, and a really nice effect in the end...

all right, let's jump in. First up we have got, in your Exercise files there's two Alpha01s, under Image... there's a JPEG and a PNG... JPEGs have no transparency or alpha, alpha is another word for transparency... but PNG, in this case does, often we're looking for PNGs to make this work... so I'm just going to bring it in and I'm going to scale it down...

use my 'K' tool get it to an appropriate size... oh, what are you doing there? Yes, I've already recorded this one, it didn't go very well, I lost my way... so we're restarting, so we've got this, we need an image for this to mask out... so I'm going to bring in another image, 'Command Shift K'... and let's bring in, I'm going to bring in 'Alpha 4', those are cool...

it's kind of a cool abstract thing... I'm going to make it the right size to cover this... and we need to remember that, who's on top, is it this, or that? That seems normal, so it's wrong, that needs to be at the back... and you select both of these... and all you need to do is hit 'Make Mask', and there we go...

it looks at our PNG, that has transparency or Alpha... and just says, all right, we'll make you a mask... who remembers the shortcut-- because it, it's not framed very well... the paint marks aren't coming through very well... who remembers the shortcut to kind of show both this and the outside? That's right, hold down the 'Option' key on a Mac, 'Alt' key on a PC...

double click it, and now I can kind of move this background one around... to kind of get it to where I want... there we go, 'Esc' a couple of times to get out, that is how you do an Alpha Mask. You can do it with shapes as well... weirdly, I can't do it with this frame, but if this frame is a rectangle... this might change in the-- I don't know why this is happening...

so let me copy the properties of that, paste the properties... rectangle, using the 'Rectangle' tool, 'Frame' tool... I'm going to bring in my PNG again... get it to an appropriate size, holding 'Shift'... I'll do one there, and I'll do another one down here, so the rectangle... as long as this is at the back, square bracket, to the back...

I can go with 'Mask', wohoo, works... play around with my gradient there, lovely... this one here though, at the moment... I need to double check that this image is not inside of the frame... it just happens to not be, where is it? My frame, 21, is there...

where's my image? Man, these are far apart on the Layers panel... I'm going to select both of them and hit my close square bracket, ']'... so they all come to the top. Now this image needs to be below the frame, but not inside of it... there you go...

and now do the same thing, and boom, they don't work... I don't know why, I haven't been able to get that to work... let me know in the comments if you do, but hey, we can just make it a rectangle... I'm going to undo that... there you go, you can do it with anything that has an Alpha channel... there's another one in there to practice with, it says Mountain Range...

what I'd like to do is actually just show you how I make... because I made these for us... you could just go out to something like Google... and say, "cityscape png" and find something... you need to check on the licenses if you're going to use this properly... or if it's just personal use, and you're practicing, download anything.

So if you want to make stuff, just out of interest... I'll show you how I do it in Photoshop... so I've got this one here, I want to mask the background... do I want the water, there's two options, right... you can 'Select', 'Subject', which often grabs the point of interest... and then over here, in your 'Layers' panel you can hit 'Mask Layer'...

save this out as a PNG, and you're away... you might have to do some tidying up. So you can use the Quick Selection tool... I'm going to hold down the 'Option' key, get rid of some of these bits in here... you just kind of drag them down, it's pretty good... there's holes that you need, you let go of that, 'Alt', or 'Option'...

just color in the bits that were left out... depends on how detailed you need to be. I'm going to add my Layer Mask, and how am I going to save it? I'm going to use the option here, so I use 'File', 'Export'... 'Export As', it's brilliant... it allows me to do a couple of things, it allows me to say...

because remember, jpegs, I kind of mentioned there, don't have transparency... so it's just going to fill it with white, which is not good, we want PNG... so it has transparency, you can see it there... and an appropriate size, so I'm going to put it in, it's 1500 pixels wide... just so it's not so big, and then I'm going to export it, so that's what I do. The other 'Option' might be, is this one here...

there's an 'Option' here to say, 'Select', 'Sky'... and I can say, 'Select', 'Inverse'... then hit that 'Layer' mask option, and do the same thing, save it out as a PNG. One last little tip, if you're looking for a really cool silhouette... sometimes the edges of this is not very strong... what you'll find is, if I do this...

can you see, it's a little bit fuzzy at the edges here... which is maybe what you want, maybe not... what you can do, is try not to be a Photoshop tutorial... but if you do want to learn Photoshop more I have an Essentials and Advanced course... with this layer selected... you can go to your 'Adjustments'...

let's look at 'Levels', which is the second one in here... and you can just mess around, because you don't actually want... you don't care about the sky and the mountains, right... you're looking for a nice high contrast between the two. So you can mess around trying to get a really clear definition between the two... it'll get rid of some of the ambiguity when you go to--  select both of these, we're being very destructive...

and let's go to... 'Merge Layers', I just right clicked, now if I go to 'Select', 'Sky'... it's just a little bit clearer about what is what... I can do the same thing, let's invert it... I have a Layer mask... and we just have a nice tidier edge...

on a lot of this, can you see, just crisper... you can spend more time and get it better... now we do a 'File', 'Export', 'Export As'... and just make sure it's a PNG, and away you go... give it a more appropriate size... and do what we did at the beginning of this course...

bring it in and use it as a mask. All right, that is masking using transparent pngs... a. k. a. Alpha Masks, a.

k. a. Alpha channels... that's it, I will see you in the next video.