text problems

[Leejune]

Am trying to do some gold text from a tutorial at progt.net, and when I get to a portion of the tutorial where it asks me to inverse an alpha channel, I get this message. What am I doing wrong?

[AppleCider]

Leejune, that tells me you're probably on the wrong layer. I took a look at that tute, and when you load the Alpha 1 selection you should be on the same layer that you rendered the Lighting effects on (the white-filled layer). It looks gold with the Lighting Effects added, but the point of this exercise is to delete all that stuff, leaving just your text.

In that tute, you should have 2 layers: the background filled layer, and a white filled layer that you rendered the Lightning on. You shouldn't have a "text" layer; your text was completely rendered in an Alpha channel for this particular tute.

Good luck, and welcome to PS Gurus!

[Leejune]

Thanks so much for responding Julie, still have not got it 100% correct, although a little better. Guess I am going to have to work on it a little more, and see if I can understand what I am doing. Am very new at this, but excited about learning more. If you happened to look in Photoshop General, had a problem with Mercator tutorial as well today, and find that the item I was missing in the instructions was because I did not have version 7 of PS. Will keep on a-truckin'

[AppleCider]

Leejune, working at it is what we all do We've all made mistakes, been puzzled, tried stuff, had happy accidents and the "omigod what's THIS mess?" You're in for quite a ride, but it's fun and rewarding!

[Leejune]

Thanks again Julie, am ready for the ride! Am checking now as have just added an avatar. Want to see if it workd

Nice Avatar Leejune

[Erik]

Leejune, in fact this message means the following:

1/ To do something with certain pixels, and not with others, you have to select them.
2/ Or, to look at it in another way: you can protect the pixels that you don't want to change with a mask (like protecting the wincow pane when you want to paint the wood of the window).

These two are the same, but talk about other things. A mask is more easy to remember because it is visible (like the tape on the window pane). Photoshop can remember a mask when you store it in a channel, and this channel is called an "alpha-channel". Just like you have a channel for each basic colour, for example a Red, Green and Blue channel.

A very basic mask would consist of only a masked area, and an area that you can work on, in other words: like a simple black and white image.
But in Photoshop you can do more: you can make that certain masked pixels are partly influenced by your action. Therefore, instead of only black and white, you have 126 different shades of grey at your disposal. Your mask can go from black (protected, you can't influence the pixels that are masked) to white (your action will change the pixels completely) with another 124 greys in between. The darker greys will protect more, the lighter ones will be more influenced by your action.
Now exactly in the center between black and white is a hue called "medium grey". Pixels that correspond with this hue in the mask are 50% influenced, and 50% protected.

To go back to where we started from: a mask and a selection are the same, but seen from an opposite point of view.
The problem is that masks are like greyscale images, but selections are visible with the help of the marching ants that surround it.
Right. This is easy when iwe talk about black and white, but where should the ants march when there is a soft transition of greyscales? Ahh, to solve this problem, the designers of Photoshop agreed to place the marching ants around an area that is at least covered for 50%. (that corresponds with medium grey in the mask).
And when no pixels that are at least covered for 50% are selected, you get this message that you got.

I, myself, did not understand all this in the beginning, but suddenly it went ahaa, and since then, I get on much better in PS.

[Erik]

A typical use of a mask is to combine images, for example, make an image change from negative into positive:

[Leejune]

Wow, Erik, thank you so much for your explanations, have copied the text and the images and will study them diligently. Right now, I might say am a little confused, but will practise with the images, and probably that will clear things up. Do appreciate you taking the trouble to do this for me. Am very enthusiastic, so think that will see me through all this stuff -
EVENTUALLY!

"Flintstone"