Pluginning the layer mask
Layer masks can be simply described as The Greatest Way Of Mucking With Your Alpha Channel. Layer masks simply rule. That’s why there are so many layer mask based tutorials out there – so this is kind of redundant. But, I will tell you here about some of the techniques I have found to be quite amusing.
Alpha channel, in case you were not aware of this, is the representation of opaqueness of the pixels of the layer. Layer mask is a grayscale bitmap that represents the modification of the alpha channel – if the corresponding pixel in layer mask is black, the layer pixel will be completely transparent, if white, completely opaque, and gray means something between. It is easy to understand, but it’s harder to see at first glance how useful they can be.
To view:
http://www.beastwithin.org/users/wwwwolf/graphtips/gimptutorials/layermaskfun.html
