This week I’m going to be looking at the differences between Opacity and Fill and how Fill can be used in conjunction with Blending Options to create more advanced effects. I’m using Adobe Photoshop CS4.

These options have been around in Photoshop for ages so I should imagine this applies to all Creative Suites and maybe even more before that.

The Opacity and Fill sections can be found directly above the layers in the Layer palette, at first glance they would seem to do the same thing, and both affect the transparency of the selected layer. However when Blending Options are applied, found by right clicking the layer and selection ‘Blending Options…’ from near the top, are the differences apparent.

In a nutshell Opacity changes the transparency of everything on that layer, including Blending Options whilst the Fill changes the transparency of just the object and not the effects applied to it. So for instance if you had a block of colour, added a drop shadow and reduced the fill, only the block of colour would become more transparent.

Opacity

 

Fill

 

As you can see, unlike the Opacity, the drop shadow and white stroke applied to the block colour are not changed.

Blending Options

Sometimes you want to create just an outline of a shape or just have a certain gradient and using Blending Options it’s a lot more controllable than trying to do it using other tools. Each effect has its own Opacity slider to control it.

So let’s say you want the outline of a shape, this can be simply achieved by drawing the shape, setting its Fill to 0% and adding a Stroke.

Another good use for transparency and Blending Options is gradients that go from solid colour to nothing. Now you could do it with the gradient tool but I prefer creating a shape, setting it to 0% Fill and using the Gradient Overlay effect to fine tune my gradient. And because it’s a Blending Option you can come back to it and change it later.

That’s all folks.