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In this video I wanted to talk about a feature
that for some reason I doesn't get a lot of coverage
It is not covered in the book. It's called an opacity mask
and there's a good reason why you might use it so
let me just draw out an example for you.
Pick a color here on this object and go ahead and
build up another object on top of it.
And let's have this one be colored a little different
There is a couple of kinds of transparencies I can use. I can apply
just the basic transparency to this
and the transparancy is affected across the entire object.
Starting with
CS4 and above what was neat is that you could also
instead of having transparency take place across
the entire object you could apply transparency and blend steps
so if I apply a gradient to this
and I click. Sorry not blend steps on gradient steps.
If I click on a particular part of the gradient
so the color white in this case notice
there's an opacity amount that I can enter
I can put in transparency and that affects just this step.
if I copy another step over, let's
make a copy of this guy and maybe change it to a different color
so we can see the effect.
In this middle step it's still 100% opaque
or we could make this even more interesting if I slide this one down
so it's not transparent and for this one on the far
left slide it back up. Now you can see it's opaque
on either end, and transparent in the middle.
But what happens if you wanted transparency that was a little more
organic, maybe you
wanted transparency that moved across part of an object in a nonlinear way
or a non-radial way you wanted a blend to
dictate transparency the object. Or gradient mesh
to do this. Well you can do that as well
I wouldn't ask the question if you couldn't do it right. Here I'm just
drawing out this this object and let's just give it a
flat color for now.
Oh I didn't mean to do just the gradient. Let's go ahead and
apply just a flat color. There we go, alright so
I have this flat color object and I'll set it on top of
so we can kinda see what's happening. Just for argument sake what I'm going to do
I'm going to make a different object on top.
Opacity masks work by having
the top item mask out the item underneath
whatever's white on top or light on top
is opaque whatever's dark on top of black is
transparant on the object below So a lot of times the first
thing that people misunderstand about him opacity masks
how the top object interacts with bottom object.
So I'm just going to draw out another object and color
black just so that we can see how this
is different. I just want to make that point
and then on to get out on the gradient mesh tool
and then just add a couple of mesh points in here.
And let's just color these things a little differently.
So make one white let's make one here
somewhat in the middle kind of a grey tone.
Make this one near white.
Over on the side here we could do something
in the middle and
leave this kind of a darker gray color.
To make an opacity mask what you do is you select the top object
again, the top object is just this gradient mesh
and the object that you're going to apply the mask to.
So I'm just selecting both
and sometimes it works better to do this in outline mode but we could see were doing
here. And then the odd about it you would think
you'd have opacity mask down in the object menu somewhere
but for whatever reason they don't have
they don't have it there. It's in the transparency palette
pop this open and any options for transparency.
I can choose make opacity mask
when I do that happens is the top object
disappears and what was ever white in the top object
we have full opacity in the bottom object .
And you can kind of see here the comparison.
whatever was black in the top object
is not transparent in the bottom object.
I think the exercise asks you to make some clouds using a opacity mask
opacity mask provides you a much more subtle
kind of transparency than the two types of transparency I described.
either transparency across the whole object
or transparency just in linear steps or radial steps
of the object. So again we could make a fluffy cloud
Why don't I just draw out a cloud here.
I'm holding down option so I can close this path that was
great tip that somebody found at closing a pencil lines.
We will just color this a flat color of
a fluffy cloud color.
There we go and will get rid of the
stroke. Now to make this fluffy cloud a
actually fluffy I'm going to copy it
paste it directly on top of itself, so command
f. Or control f if you are on the PC.
in this front object I'm going to first
set it's a fill to black.
There we go, and then I'm going to scale it down
a little bit. Change it's pivot point just a little here.
and for this interior one I'm going to
give it a fill that's closer to white. Notice that it works with
any color I just like to think about black-and-white
it helps me think in terms of what's could be opaque what's could be transparent
If we look at this, right at that edge
here is to be transparent but in the middle areas can be near
I'm going to make blend out of this so I'm going to select both shapes
Object, blend, make.
Get that nice little continuous blend here.
Now I'm going to select the blend and that
shape behind so I'm just going to drag a marquee over the entire thing.
It's important to understand this is different than the shape that I'm actually making
affecting the opacity mask on.
the object on top is this complex blend object
and behind it is a cloud shape at the same.
I could do this with completely different shape just like I did here.
Ok so I'm making sure that they're all selected
open up transparency make opacity mask.
Now my cloud you can't really tell here what's happening but if I drag it
over something now you can see that cloud has a fluffy vector
edge to it based off of the shape below it.
Sorry the shape above it. By the way if you want to edit a mask
just click on it in the transparency palette
and I can come in and I can affect part of the blend.
Maybe I wanted to be wider. So I can choose a
lighter color and you will notice affects it
Click on the outer part of blend and I want this actually to be a little
bit lighter so that it's more opaque. So we'll just come in
adjust its color a little bit so it's just
a little wider by doing that I'm affecting its transparency.
When you're done, by the way
are editing an opacity mask if you look in the layer pallet all you will see is opacity mask.
You will just see the blend item and that's all you
you can work with. The minute you flip back to editing the
original shape than your layer palette
goes back to just being normal. So
that's an opacity mask there's cool things you can do. Note that I can
reverse that can invert the mask so now
it's light around the edges and transparent
in the middle. So every cloud has its silver lining there you go
you could make something like that. So opacity masks are very cool
clip thing this acts like clipping masks and if you have an object that's
larger than the masking item then it's going to clip at the masking item.
If you wanted to do that.
Very powerful you can do you can do this with other objects
too I'm going to lay in some text.
I should probably get some lorem ibsome text but I'm being lazy.
And make this
text a little bit smaller. Let's make it
9pt and I'm going to adjust the leading on it
so that it's nice and tight as well.
And let's copy and paste it a little more.
And it changed the (tom trails off)
Oh that doesn't look any good at all. Let's bring this in
a little bit ok now we have a little bit of a text right. Of course you would bring in
real text instead of this but I have text here. Now I'm going to
place the graphic to see if I can go out
Do I have any pictures?
You know what I wonder if I'm missing
a picture.
Let's generate a picture real quick.
So in Photoshop
Oh that's huge I don't want that
7 x 10 okay
Oh did I do 7 X 10 pixels?
I think I did, sorry.
Let's set this over to inches. Let's have this be
7 X 10 Tall
I just want to generate some quick texture that render clouds thing in Photoshop
is a fun way to work. So I'll save this you know we
do all kinds of interesting things here but this will be good.
This is what we need so I'll just save this out to the desktop.
Come back
into illustrator, we will place that.
Let's see it's untitled.
Oh and I wanted to show you one other thing while we are placing.
We are going to link to this file and I'm going to
show you a reason that linking is cool in this case.
So we place it in its quite a bit bigger will scale it down here
so it's a little closer in size.
Okay and again same idea
we are going to place this on top select both the text
and the clouds make an opacity mask
and now my text has the cloud transparency
in it. Which is really cool now I can slide
the silver and you can actually see the clouds passing
through the type
there's been all kinds of interesting little advertisements in the past that
use this little gimmick and it was hard to do photographically
but with illustrator but it's easy.
I wanted to show you why by linking well if I go back
to Photoshop and
do some contrast on this. So let's really pump up the contrast
here. So now I've really increased
where we are going to have transparency in the black
areas and opacity in white areas. Save it.
Come back to illustrator and you get this nice little message
this isn't always bad message they the files are missing or modified
we know the file is modified. We want to update the link yeah!
And when we do notice it increases our transparency
settings for type so that's a really cool
way to kind of work between Illustrator and Photoshop.
So opacity masks but very powerful I don't think there very well
understood you can do all kinds of neat things with them.
And in the exercise it asks you to make some clouds like this.
And in the exercise it asks you to make some clouds like this. But experiment
experiment gradient meshes it and use for them.
And experiment taking some photos and bringing those and illustrator you still have this vector
edge. But then where the transparancy is
determined. It's determined at the pixel level so obviously
it's that kind of a mixing between vector and transparent
oh I'm sorry vecor and rastor information.
So there you have it all please let me know if you have questions. END