Creating and Using an Alpha Channel as a Clipping Path

By Jacci Howard Bear, About.com Guide

Alpha channels serve many purposes when editing images. For the purposes of this tutorial, we're going to create alpha channels that will contain transparency information for use as clipping paths in a page layout application.

This tutorial is not meant to be an indepth look at working with channels. I'll show you a few of the basics.

For these exercises we'll use some building blocks. These images are from the Hemera Photo-Objects Volume II Collection.

• As we covered in Creating an Embedded Clipping Path, you can use the magic wand and other selection tools to select the portions of your image you wish to have transparent. For this image, the magic wand tool works to isolate the three blocks from the white background. To isolate a single block, Photoshop's Magnetic Lasso Tool works nicely.

• As also shown in the embedded paths tutorial, converting your selection to a work path allows for precision finetuning of the clipping path.

Up to this point, creating an alpha channel for use as a clipping path is exactly the same as creating an embedded path. But what you do after this point is what makes it an Alpha Channel.

Previous

• Isolate Your Background
• Save Selection as a New Channel
• Access Alpha Channel Information in Page Layout Software
• Using Multiple Alpha Channels as Clipping Paths

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