The lettering and the arrows on this page are filled with the same texture, and have drop shadows. We will look at the arrows, to see the behaviour of drop shadows with an object.

I made only one arrow, the one on the left which points forward to the next page. (As you can see, I did not make the arrows on a textured background, but we will come to that in a moment.) I made the arrow from a dingbat font, so I was able to fill it with the texture and give it a drop shadow using the text options. Text is made as an object, so I was able to make the second arrow by duplicating and flipping it as we did earlier with the tiles.

When objects have a shadow, the graphic and its shadow appear as individual objects in the Layer Manager. But they cannot be separated. You see in the picture on the right that they have the same number in the corner of the thumbnail frame. If you select the object, its shadow is selected too, and vice versa.

But the beauty of this arrangement is that although the shadow is permanently linked to its object, it is able to behave intelligently. When I copied and flipped the second arrow, its shadow moved to the same direction as before it was flipped. You can see in the picture above that the light appears to be hitting both arrows from the same direction.

If I had merged the first arrow with the background, instead of keeping it as an object, when I selected it, copied it and flipped it, it would have become an object again, but its shadow would have been merged with it, would no longer be an individual object, and would no longer be able to move in relation to its graphic. The result would have been the arrow you see on the left, with its shadow on the wrong side. And in the Layer Manager there would have been just the one thumbnail - the arrow as you see it here.

I don't want these arrows on plain white backgrounds like this. If I make them transparent .gifs the shadows will look unnatural, so I need them as .jpgs on the embossed texture, and I did not start off with the embossed texture in the image. Do I have to start again? Not when I am working in layers. I can put a new layer under the arrows and put the texture on that. This is how it is done. In the Layer Manager, click on an area outside the thumbnails, so that nothing is selected. Use Edit/Selection/All, followed by Edit/Selection/Convert to object. Another object, a white rectangle, will appear in the Layer Manager. Before we put the texture on it I am going to digress a little to show you something else about layers.

There is a 'pecking order' to the objects in the Layer Manager. The one in the top left corner will be on top of the heap if you pile all your objects on top of each other in your image. The next one down will be the next one along in the top row, and so on until you get to the last one, the right hand one on the bottom row, which will be at the bottom of the heap. If you want to change which objects in your image are in front and which behind, you simply move the thumbnails in the Layer manager. As things are, in the Layer Manager as shown above, the arrow pointing left will go in front of the one pointing right. They both show against the background.

But if I put them back where they were, and then in the Layer Manager, move the white object I have just created in between them, the arrow pointing right vanishes, because it is now below the white layer.

But it is still there, and if, instead of having the white rectangle selected as in the picture, I click on the right pointing arrow in the Layer Manager to select that, the marquee which surrounds a selected object will appear.

And there is another interesting thing about layers and objects. If I select the white rectangle again, and click on the Layer Manager Options Button and then select Properties, this box will appear. If, as I have in this one, I set transparency at 30%, the white layer will become semi-transparent and let a ghostly arrow show through.

If I had several colours in my layer I could have nominated just one colour, or a range of similar colours to be transparent. I could have set a soft edge round the transparent area so that it blended better with what was showing through, or moved my transparent object by changing its co-ordinates in this box. The parameters in this box can be applied to every object you have in an image. If you want to hide part of your object - if you are making a collage, for instance - you paint over the part you want to hide in a colour not used in the object, and make that one colour 100% transparent. Anything on a layer below that object will show through the transparent area.

However, what I really want to do is put a texture underneath these two arrows, so I have restored the transparency to 0 and moved the white rectangle back down so it is the last object in the Layer Manager, and clicked on it to select it. Once an object is selected, you can apply a fill to it and even though it is below other objects in the image, it will be completely filled without affecting the objects above it.

To fill it, I used the embossed tile. I made it the current image, and used copy and paste, so that I had an object copy on top of the tile that I could peel off. I held down the T key while dragging this peel-off object to the arrows image where the white rectangle was still selected. Holding down the T key makes the object you are placing tile in the selected area, so the embossed object filled the rectangle and gave me my embossed background.

I hope that this has given you a taste for objects and layers, and that you will find it easier to make use of their versatility. If you save an image as a .UFO file (Ulead File for Objects) the objects are preserved and you can continue to work with them on their separate layers when you reload the image. This is the only file format which preserves them. If you save as .jpg .gif or .bmp the objects will be merged into the background.

 
 

 

© Carol Brooksbank 2003
This tutorial may not be copied to any other website nor distributed in any way. It may be downloaded for personal use only. Links to my tutorials at http://www.caroluk.co.uk/tutindex/ are welcome.

 

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