From the course: Photoshop One-on-One: Advanced

Working with Fill Opacity - Photoshop Tutorial

From the course: Photoshop One-on-One: Advanced

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Working with Fill Opacity

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- In this movie, we'll blend the text in with its background using a combination of a blend mode, along with a special variety of translucency, known as fill-opacity. So notice over here in the layers panel, that we have what amounts to two opacity options. One's called opacity, and the other is called fill, which is short for fill-opacity. And you can confirm that by just double-clicking on an empty portion of the layer right here to bring up the layer style dialog box, and notice these guys right here, which start with the blend mode, the opacity value, and the fill-opacity value, they're all repeats of these options right here. So, we can see that the blend mode is currently set to normal, and both the opacity and fill-opacity values are set to 100%. All right, so I'm going to go ahead and cancel out of this dialogue. Since we do have the opportunity to edit these values directly inside the layers panel. Now, the primary difference between these two options is that opacity affects the entire layer including the layer effects, whereas fill-opacity affects the layer but it does not affect the effects. And to see what that looks like, I'll just making sure that one of my selection tools is active. Currently, it's the rectangular marquee tool, and then we'll press the five key to reduce the opacity of the layer to 50%. And you can see that our drop shadow is getting less opaque as well. If I press the two key to reduce the opacity value to 20%, it's almost as if the drop shadow is entirely disappeared. That's not what I want. So I'm going to press the zero key to reset the opacity value to 100%. And instead of changing the opacity value, I'm going to change the fill-opacity by clicking on this little down pointing arrow head and reducing it to, say, something really low, like 20%. At which point you can see that although the letters are much more translucent, the drop shadow is still as opaque as it ever was. Now, one of the great things about fill-opacity is that you can access it from the keyboard. And you can do so, first by pressing the enter key, or the return key on the Mac to hide that little slider. and then you add shift along with a number key. So, for example, if you press shift nine, you'll dial in a fill-opacity value of 90%. If you take it down to shift five, that'll be 50%, shift two, that we just saw a moment, ago is 20%, shift zero is going to take you up to 100%. Now, if you're looking for finer control, then you can press two numbers in a row while the shift key is down. So, for example, if I type shift four or five I'm going to dial in a fill value of 45%. If you want to fill value of 0%, you press shift zero, zero. So, zero twice in a row. And that will give you no fill whatsoever, so the letters are now, strictly speaking, invisible and we see just the shadow and nothing more. And one of the great things about this is that this text is still editable. If I go ahead and select the type tool, or I can press the T key, and then I double click on the word to select it, I can replace the type with the word "raised", just by typing in those letters. After which point I can accept my changes, either by pressing the escape key or the enter key on the numerical key pad. Now, as it turns out, I don't really want these letters to be altogether transparent. I want them, rather, to lighten things up in the background, so they look like they're on the same plane as this raised edge right here. And so the first thing I'm going to do is take the fill value up to 30% by pressing shift three, and that works when the type tool is active as well. And then I'm going to change the blend mode from normal to overlay, which I can do by either choosing it from this pop-up menu or I could have pressed shift alt O here on the PC, or shift option O on the Mac. And as you can see the result is some brighter letters that better match this framed edge. And that, friends, is how you take advantage of fill-opacity which allows you to modify the translucency of a layer, independently of its effects.

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