Learn how to change the value of opacity in Adobe Photoshop CS3 Extended.
Tags:adobe,adobe photoshop cs3 extended,images,opacity,photoshop,total training
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Now you might have been noticing as we have gone through our hamburger that some of these layers are not really realistic. Now that's hard for me to admit, but I understand that these lettuce are not super photo realistic lettuce. I mean I have painted it from scratch so I am kind of myself little slack here.
But one of the things that we can do to make this a little bit more believable is to change the Opacity of the lettuce. We could do that from right here in the Layers Palette. Opacity, basically, is kind of the opposite of transparency. If something is 100% opaque or in other words if the Opacity is at 100%, it means that you can't see through it at all.
If the Opacity is 0%, it's basically like saying that it's all the way transparent. So what we can do is select the lettuce layer and go here to the Opacity slider inside of the Layers Palette and we could change that opacity. I could do that in actually three ways. I realize that this looks just like one way to do it, just there is 100% and maybe you will click in here and select this and maybe type in 50% and hit Enter, which you can do. That's little bit too transparent. If you also click this layer on this side which then pops out the slider. It's a little bit easier to control than manually typing in a number and that might be a little bit more believable.
But still there is another secret folks. A better way to adjust Opacity and this is a relatively new feature, not new in CS3, but a somewhat new feature in Photoshop and that is we can click on many words inside of Photoshop such as the word Opacity and we get this icon. It looks like a finger with a double sided arrow on it. What this icon tells us is that we can scrub this property, meaning that we can just click on it, hold the mouse down and drag to the left or right. This is cool for several reasons.
Number one, we don't have to get in and be exactly precise about where we were clicking as we do with these other alternatives. We could click anywhere in here where we get this icon, just click and haphazardly just drag anywhere around. Also it's the easiest way to kind of see where things are going. I could just scale it up a little bit and maybe a little bit more, maybe a little bit more. It's a lot easier if you don't know what you are doing just kind of play around a little bit and by the way, you see this feature this scrub feature all over the place inside of Photoshop now. It's not just here in Opacity, it's all throughout the application.
So whenever you see a dialog box or a little field somewhere you can type in information, try clicking on the word, the property name and getting that Scrub icon and adjusting there. It's not everywhere, but it's in most places in Photoshop. And just a little bit of Photoshop Trivia this comes from Photoshop's animation buddy, Adobe After Effects. So it's a great little trick from that application and we are so glad, all of us fans of After Effects to see it here in Photoshop as well.
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