Masks

Did you try to you use the blend component? Connect the thing you want to mask to the foreground node and connect your (black and white) mask channel to the opacity node. Then plug the output of the tree that comes before your effect into the background.

But there is another way which I find quite interesting, too:

Quote
Quasimondo wrote: Did you try to you use the blend component? Connect the thing you want to mask to the foreground node and connect your (black and white) mask channel to the opacity node. Then plug the output of the tree that comes before your effect into the background.

umm, i'm probably mis-duplicating something here, but that didnt seem to work. so, let's make sure we're talking the same things here. your 'black and white mask channel' is the levels component or something else?

the second one worked like you said. but maybe i'm missing something here or perhaps stating something wrong. what i want to end up with is a partial transparency, the part that is masked. i guess what i'm trying to say is, i want an eraser. i want the effect to be applied on the mask as an erase effect and then be able to either export that in a format that saves that alpha channel transparency when using FF as a stand-alone or when used as a plugin, to apply that to the layer in psp or photoshop that FF is applying to.

or, since masks are usually used to protect an area from being affected, apply the erase effect to the part not masked. either way would be fine. but i want to be able to erase to the canvas level and apply it and save it as such.

i know i can do this with black and white type masking and save that to ps or psp and then erase based on something like 'brighness', but that doesnt always work well since sometimes you have a naturally black or white area in the area you dont want erased.

i'll keep experimenting. maybe the alpha channel components can help here.

craig

quasi,

yup. that did the trick. thanks

the other thing i realized to help all this was that i could use FF as a plugin and export to a blank raster layer rather than on top of a layer with an image on it.

excellent. i'm already working with variations now.

craig