Here are some photos from the Crystal River area in Florida. The springs are very beautiful and the water chilly and clear. It really is one of the nicest places in the United States this side of Yellowstone. You can swim with the manatees, travel the endless miles of pure crystal spring water, see the only live mermaid show in the world a little ways south in Weeki Wachee. It’s a wonderful area for naturists.
I’ve done a little revamping of the photo album. Don’t forget to use the Show Sidebar link on the left side to gain access to tools. I’ll slowly be adding some new features to the Gallery, but right now I’m liking how much quicker it is with most plugins disabled. Anyways, here are some pictures from the Coral Castle in Miami.
In this tutorial we will use very simple graphics to understand layer masks. Layer masks scare a lot of people, but they are actually really simple. If you’ve done the original seamless background tutorial you should now understand what a layer is. Each Layer is a separate image that is combined with our other layers/images to create a final project.
A layer mask is simply a way to hide and show different parts of your layer. You can add a layer mask on any layer by right clicking on that layer in the Layers dialog and then clicking on Add Layer Mask. By default the color white is fully opaque and black is fully transparent. That means any part of the layer mask that is completely white will make that part of the parent layer fully visible. Any fully black portions are fully see through on the parent layer. Using black to white gradients on a layer mask makes a soft transition from transparent to opaque.
Enough talk, lets make a project and see layer masks ourselves.
Let’s make a new image 256 x 256 any color of your choice. Add a 2nd layer and fill it with any other color that you’d like. We’re using ctrl-a (select->all) then the paint bucket tool to fill the layer. As you see we have a very simple image so far.
Now we will add our layer mask. Right click on the upper layer in the layer dialog box shown, in my case here it’s the blue one. After right clicking, click Add Layer Mask from the menu that appears. Leave the default setting of White (full opacity).
Hit okay and we will now see our white layer mask in the layer dialog box right next to the image, again in my case the blue layer. You can now click on the small swatches in the layer dialog to choose either the image layer or the layer mask to edit. The currently selected object will have a white border around it. Click back and forth a few times until you are comfortable.
Now let’s focus on our image dialog for a minute. Use the rectangular selection tool and select a box in the center of our image. This will be our layer mask. Make sure to select pure black as your foreground color.
Now use the paintbucket tool to fill our selection with black. But we won’t see black unless that is the color of our bottom layer. If you have selected the layer mask, you’ll see the black square in the layers dialog box.
That is what layer masks do. Anywhere there is black in our layer mask we can see through our layer to the layer below. They are simple to use, but can be used to great effect in your graphics.
One last thing we’ll look at in this tutorial is the use of gradients in the layer mask. This allows you to blend the images together and achieve better results in many situations. So, let’s set our foreground color to black and the background color to white. We want to effect the entire image, to hit ctrl-a (select->all).
Now click on the gradient tool on our toolbar. Let’s leave the default options that appear in the graphic below. It will be a linear gradient from the foreground color (black) to the background color (white).
Now click in the upper left corner of the image dialog and drag down to the bottom right. The gradient you select will always follow the path you set for it by clicking and dragging. You can use any of the gradient styles for the layer mask, but it must always be black to white or vice versa.
I hope this tutorial has helped you to grasp the fundamentals of layer masks. While we didn’t really do anything exciting here, we put down a solid foundation on a feature that is used to accomplish a lot of things with images. They can be used to blend images, make a logo stand out and other interesting effects.
Layer masks are essential if you hope to work in some portions of the graphics industry. They are also known as the opacity channel and are required in certain professional projects, especially if you work in television.
As it is pretty easy to see we are under construction. I will actually be getting some work done around here, so expect to see some old things return and some new things. Basically realized it was time to really streamline things and tidy up a while ago, but haven’t had much time.
Some of the links aren’t yet operational due to the fact that I migrated this site from the shadows to the main page. If you get a page not found error I am working on the issue.
You can still access the old site here. What’s left will slowly be dismantled and relevant information will be moved here.
Here is another repeating background tutorial that is still entry level. We’ll assume that you’ve done the Sinus Pattern Tutorial and have a basic understanding of the GIMP.
Sometimes the best graphic designs come from a little luck or by playing with the tools at your disposal until you create something you like. Many times I find myself taking this route and there have been quite a few instances where it’s worked out well for me. This is no replacement for having a solid plan for the job, though. Knowing what you are doing is a good thing. But sometimes part of understanding what you are doing is by getting your hands a little dirty.
Let’s create a new file in the GIMP that is 256 x 256. On our first layer we’ll add just a plain old sinus pattern by clicking Filters-> Render-> Pattern-> Sinus. Set the colors under the color tab to black and white.
After you’ve placed the sinus pattern add a new layer and this time we are going to make a checkerboard by clicking Filters-> Render-> Pattern -> Checkerboard. This may or may not be tile-able depending on the size of the checkerboards. For our graphic size we will make it 25 pixels.
As you can see the pattern is not perfect, but it will work just fine for what we are doing. We will now look to mix our two images in an eye catching manner. You can cycle through the different layer viewing modes for the checkerboard layer, but as I said, we’re going to go one little step farther in this tutorial.
We are going to use the Bump Map Filter on the checkerboard layer. The Bump Map Filter creates the illusion of 3D by using color gradients. The GIMP allows us to select a file to use as our bump map for a myriad of possibilities. What file are we going to use? Don’t worry, we can use a GIMP layer and we’ll use the sinus layer as our bump map.
So let’s go to Filters-> Map-> Bump Map. Clicking preview on the left will let you see image updates as you make changes. The select box that says Bump Map is where we will select our sinus layer, or any layer you’d like to use as your bump map. There are three styles of mapping, for this graphic we’ll use spherical. Don’t forget you can flip through any of the settings and see the changes in the preview window.
Azimuth, Elevation and Depth are the three main controls. Depth is how much 3d you’d like to see, while azimith and elevation adjust lighting direction and have some to do with how the depth displays, also. Here we’ve made the azimuth about 243, elevation 33 and depth 50.
Not exactly impressed, right? It’s a little rough right now, but it’s time to change the layer mode from normal to multiply. Now that’s a little better.
Now that wasn’t so tough was it? Building complex graphics is just like building simple ones, just with more steps. We’ll try to take another step in complexity in our next go around. In the meantime, why not add some color to our graphic? The overlay layer mode might add a little more life.