Invisible <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> If all of the complex manipulations seen here are really done with 
> layers... hmm, it must take quite a bit of planning to make sure 
> everything is in the correct layer and not accidentally paint yourself 
> into a corner.

  You wouldn't believe the sheer amount of layers a graphics professional
uses when creating images. We are talking about hundreds.
  Every single minuscule thing is usually put into its own layers.

  If I'm not completely mistaken, you can group several layers in Photoshop
into one entity which then works as if it was a single layer. This way
you can eg. move a part of the image, which in itself is composed of many
layers, as if it was just one layer.

  Naturally layers can (and should) be named so that you can keep track
of what is where.

> Lilah appears to be in a single layer. (He moves her around as one 
> item.) And yet, he was able to scale just one leg. How do layers help here?

  Probably a bunch of layers grouped together, or maybe some other technique.

> >> - I guess the floor fills kind of give it away that this *must* be a 
> >> bitmap. But how does he manage to fill in all that counter-shading and 
> >> never accidentally draw over the outlining? Is he just extremely 
> >> skillful, or is the software assisting him somehow?
> > 
> >   Layers and layer masks.

> DPaint used to have a thing called "stencils" where you could mark 
> certain colours as "protected", and any pixels drawn in that colour 
> can't be altered. (Remember, DPaint works with palette-based bitmaps.)

> Is this a similar trick, or something different?

  A layer mask is basically an alpha channel for a layer. That is,
besides having a full rgba color layer, the layer can have an additional,
separate alpha channel (called layer mask) which is applied to the layer
as well.
  This is handy when you want to show/hide parts of a layer, without
actually modifying the contents of that layer. And the other way around
is useful too: You can edit the contents of the layer without modifying
the layer mask, which means that your edits will never "bleed" outside
boundaries.

  The layer mask is not a bitmask, but a full alpha mask. This means
that parts of the layer can partially visible, not just on/off.

> >> - How the heck does he do that thing with the floorboards? And the 
> >> shading for the shadow in the doorway? I've never seen anything so 
> >> advanced, ever!
> > 
> >   Layers, transparency.

> Well, sure - but how does he make the shadow edges soft? That must 
> involve some pretty special shading technology. Most software I've seen 
> will do simple linear colour gradients, but not complex shadow outlines 
> like that.

  Varying degrees of alpha transparency. I don't see any difficulty in that.

  In rgba images each pixel has an alpha transparency value. This value
can change from pixel to pixel.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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