I’ve been playing with the CS3 beta for the last few months, and it’s certainly an impressive beast. The latest incarnation – Photoshop 10, or CS3 – is just around the corner Adobe officially launched it last week, and it’s currently available for pre-order at the time of writing. This impressive application, nearly 20 years old, is very much the industry standard for image editing and photo retouching, and is often the software of choice for the Web designer too. Now in this case, we would probably have no reason to think of this, or to describe it, other than per (a).īut in complicated situations, the other outlook can help us figure out what has happened.If you’re a professional Web designer, chances are that you’ve used Photoshop at least once in your life. Photoshop makes that look to us like a gray checkerboard. The pixels there are transparent we see right though the into the "great empty beyond". The pixels there are transparent, and Photoshop signals that to us with the gray checkerboard.ī. We can look at the significance of what we see in two different ways:Ī. Lets talk about the surround, which appears as a gray checkerboard. Now if we examine this GIF file in our Photoshop, what do we see? Well, it looks just like the file did before. Supposed we save it as a GIF file, with transparency preserved? Then, Photoshop makes the colored area semitransparent (alpha=0.4)) and makes the surround transparent (alpha=0). Nothing is transparent or semitransparent anymore. If we examine that file in our Photoshop, we see a faded colored square (it has a different color than as we drew it) surrounded by white. Suppose we save this setup as a JPG file? Then, Photoshop makes the "great empty beyond" look white. So we see the blend of those "two things seen". What do we see? The great empty beyond, which looks like a checkerboard. How can we explain this in terms of our "great empty beyond" metaphor? In the center, we "40%" see the colored pixels, but we "60%" see through them. In the center, a faded colored square "mixed with" a faded checkerboard around that, a checkerboard. Now, suppose we have only a single layer, with a colored square in its center and the remainder transparent. Said another way, it is as if, for visual purposes only (that is, with respect to what we see on the screen), Photoshop has placed below the lowest layer of the stack a ground sheet covered with the gray checkerboard.Īnd in this outlook, that's what we really see, not the "transparent-ness" of the pixels on either of the layers as such. But Photoshop helps us out by making the "great empty beyond" look like a gray checkerboard (on screen). What does that look like? Well, not like anything. There being no further layer below, we see right through into the "great empty beyond"? What happens there? Again, we "see right through it". Suppose that in all or part of that region, the Lower layer content is also transparent. What do we see? The content of the Lower layer there. Where the Upper layer content is transparent, we "see right through it". (By the way, no masks are involved here.) Lets imagine we have two layers, Upper and Lower. (We will assume Normal blend mode throughout.)īut we can look at what happens a different way. If we look at the mechanism, we realize that the composite image is transparent only where every one of the component layers is transparent. That's hardly strange we see red where the composite image is red. If we have a file with two or more image layers, we see the checkerboard where the composite image is transparent. (Experienced Photostat wallopers will of course be able to grasp as much as they need to know intuitively, but we telephone engineers sometimes need to have a block diagram.) There's another, completely-compatible outlook on the meaning of the checkerboard that can help us unscramble some of the difficult situations. In some situations, it may be a little difficult to figure out what the thing we see means (especially when we see a combination of a faded checkerboard and a faded actual color, and in multi-layer situations with masks having semitransparency and various blending modes). That's actually accurate, but in a way that may be a little more complicated than we recognize. In Photoshop, a light gray checkerboard pattern (that's the default - we can redesign it if we wish) is said to show "transparent pixels". This is today's entry in the "Kerr's least useful Photoshop fact" contest.
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