The one on the left represents your current layer, the one on the right represents the mask for that layer. Your Layers palette will now show TWO icons for your “Reflection” layer: Top open the Alpha Channel you need to right click on the Reflection layer and choose “Add layer mask.” You will get the following dialog box: To do this type of reflection we are going to use a Black to White gradient on the Alpha Channel The white end of the gradient will be closest to the correct logo and the black end of the gradient will be at the far bottom edge of the logo to make the very bottom edge seem to disappear – in this case, fade off to white. A true neutral Grey (50%) will give you a 50 percent viewability through the current layer. The transparency is dependant on black and white colors: The whiter the color on the Alpha Channel the more of the current layer you see and the blacker the color on the Alpha Channel the more of the lower layer you will see. The Alpha Channel refers to the transparency of the layer but gives us more control over how or what portion of the layer becomes transparent versus the Opacity slider in the Layers Palette. Give an extra few pixels between the two logos for good measure, it will add to the effect.Īnd now we get to play with Alpha Channels. A good reflection line is the bottom edge of the shadow under the “g” in the logo, this appears to be the vertically lowest point. Just as we did with the drop shadow, we need to move this layer into the proper reflection location. You should see something like this on the canvas: On the Edit menu choose Transform – Flip Vertically. Photoshop users will find themselves in very familiar territory with this process as it is nearly identical to the Photoshop Transform. Since we know that this new layer will become the reflection, go ahead and rename it to “Reflection.” The reflection will be made manually in much the same way we made the drop shadow manually, initially by duplicating the layer. Regardless, lets change it to something more usable, like “Logo.” I would also recommend turning the “Background” layer back on because it make visualizing the process easier. I don’t know how it picks the name of the layer we just created, I think it may be based on what layer was selected when we merged. The appearance of the logo on the canvas should not have changed but the number of layers did. Use the default options on the “Merge Layers” dialog. Your Layers Palette will change from this: Now we need to combine all of our logo layers into a single editable layer by clicking the “Layers” menu and choosing “Merge Visible.” Again, this saves the transparencies but preserves our background layer. We want to turn off the white background layer by clicking on the icon of an eye next to the layer named “Background.” This will save all the transparencies, you will get something like this: This simplifies the process greatly because we can then make the reflection act as if it were on a simple layer in far fewer steps. To begin with we need to make our whole logo, including all the layers, into a single layer. What’s it going to take? Simple First we need to make the reflection, then we need to do that gradient transparency to it. Lets first take a look at where we should be now and where we want to go: Photoshop users will be happy to learn that we will be using the Transform and Alpha Channel features of GimpShop and see just how similar and easy they are to use compared to Photoshop. The end result that I promised included an inverted reflection of the logo as if it were sitting over a mirror or body of water. We were looking at this in an effort to cover some of the versatility and ability of GimpShop as compared to the king of all photo editing software – Adobe’s Photoshop. Previously we looked at taking a pretty generic Ubuntu logo and adding a color gel shadowing effect to the humans portion of the logo and a basic dropshadow for the text.
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