Digital
Painting has never been
so much fun: Learn to
paint with Particle Brushes!
PD
Particles - $19
A fun companion for your
digital
photo image editor!
powered
by Project
Dogwaffle
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Getting
started with Digital
Painting on a slim budget:
PD
Artist now
$29!
Draw,
Sketch, Animate & Paint
powered
by Project
Dogwaffle
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Tutorials:
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intro - in the beginning, there was nothing but a blank
sheet of pixels
part 1 - getting started with Twisted
Brush Pro Studio
part 2 - Saving the image and
alpha
channel in a single file
part 3 - Loading an image file straight to PD's
Custom Brush
part 4 - Loading two images: color and mask into
one
part 5 - Discovering new brushes:
Kaleidoscope!
part 6 - Painting into an AVI file to record as
animation
part 7 - Mandala
brush animation with
animated multi-frame brushes
part 8 - The
animated Brush Timeline edtor
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Saving
the Image with an Alpha Channel
As mentioned earlier, it may be
preferable to save the transparency mask of the layer in the same file
which holds the rgb color channels. Here's how to achieve this. There
are several file formats which support 32-bit cdepths, and thus can
hold an 8-bit alpha channel in addition to the 24-bit colors.
In this example, we'll use the PNG format, which seems to work well. It
is also a universally recognized format found in most other imaging
applications.
Here's an example in which the background layer is made invisible. The
first layer above it, Layer 2, contains an image which we painted with
numerous holes in it. Leave this layer enabled (visible).
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Now simply do the
same save/export operation from the File menu. Be sure to use the
PNG format:
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That's it. Now
you can switch to Project Dogwaffle and open that saved image.
Note that by default, PD looks for Targa files. Be sure to select the
Automatic type (60+ formats)
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After loading that saved image, it may or may not look right. The
marching antswhich indicate the selection regions may be invisible, but
they're probably present.
Note: in the case of blobs and a handful of other brushes there are
colored pixels in the fully transparent areas extending beyond what is
normally seen. This is normal, in the sense that these transparent
areas aren't expected to be seen.
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In order to remove the extraneous pixels which are outside of the
alpha-enabled zones, you'll want to clear the proper selection to black
or whatever color you prefer.
You can turn the marching ants visible in the alpha channel with the
backslash shortcut, or from the alpha menu: turn Alpha on/off
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If you store the alpha:
menu: Alpha > Store alpha...
you will notice that the white zones are inside the selection:
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You may want to instead Invert the alpha and enable the outer regions
and holes.
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After inverting the stored alpha, replace the actual alpha channel with
the new stored one.
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Or you could have simply used the Invert alpha directly in the apha
menu.
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Now you can clear the selection to black. This will get rid of
extraneous garbage pixels which need not be shown.
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Next, we'll take a
closer look at other ways to load the image, either with two separate
images (color and mask) or as a custom brush.
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Inventory Blowout
Sale:
Poser 6 (boxed!) at
lowest prices:
for MacOs
or Windows
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