July, 2007
In this tutorial I'll cover opacity masks and how they work.
Let's start with a bottle made in Illustrator.
You can create a design in Photoshop which I find easier to do and then copy and paste it directly into Illustrator. I used a shape here. This is one version, straight black-and-white.
With the bottle selected, open Transparency and choose Make Opacity Mask.
Uh-oh. Where the bottle go? It's there, we just can't see it.
No click on the right square.
Paste the item you copied in Photoshop into the right square.
With adjustment to the pasted piece we get a look like the one below.
Delete the above pasted piece. Back in Photoshop create a nice gradient. Copy and paste into the right-pane in Illustrator.
After pasting the gradient into the right-pane, and transformed it vertically to better see the result. Where there's white the color shows through but where there's black it's hidden.
Still with the same gradient and mask, click Invert and see the result.
In Photoshop let's add a shape use Gaussian Blur then copy once more.
Without removing the last gradient, I pasted this alpha into the right-pane.
Of course, I reduced the size of the pasted version after pasting into Illustrator to more easily show you the results.
Making a different gradient and then using a soft brush to make dots in Photoshop, I then copied this alpha.
I pasted the above into the mask and reduced transparency to 90%. Using masks can really give interesting effects to a piece.
Here I've deleted all of the pasted pieces in Illustrator's Transparency, unchecked Invert Mask, and then pasted the last pasted gradient piece into the right-pane.
Here I used the Fiber filter and pasted it into the right-pane.
Here's a design also pasted into Illustrator's Mask with an Invert Mask and Difference applied.
There is so much variety you can achieve.
And more.
Download the original source files from this tutorial in Zip format Here
Copyright (c) 2007, Jacquelin Vanderwood, All Rights Reserved
