From the course: Photoshop CC 2017 One-on-One: Advanced

Working with Fill Opacity - Photoshop Tutorial

From the course: Photoshop CC 2017 One-on-One: Advanced

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Working with Fill Opacity

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- [Instructor] 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 dialog 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 make sure that one of my Selection tools is active. Currently, it's the rectangular Marquee tool and then I'll press the 5 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 2 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 0 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 arrowhead 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 9, you'll dial in a Fill opacity value of 90%. If you take it down to Shift 5, that'll be 50%. Shift 2, that we just saw a moment ago, is 20%. Shift 0 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 4 5, I'm going to dial in a Fill value of 45%. If you want a Fill value of 0%, you press Shift 0 0. So, zero twice in a row, and that will give you no fill whatsoever, so that 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 keypad. 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 plan as this raised edge right here. And so, the first I'm going to do is take the Fill value up to 30% by pressing Shift 3, 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 popup menu or I could've pressed Shift Alt O here on a 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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