Fill

Hello Fablers, and welcome back to another Academy training video. In this video, we're going to be talking about the Fill color utility. In our scene here, I've prepped it with three versions of the same image. Essentially the left and the right are identical. The one in the middle, the only difference is that I've added a hue and saturation module. I turned the saturation all the way down to make it a black and white image. I'll explain why in a moment.

Here on the left, go ahead up into our effects panels. Let's go down to our color bin here in utilities. Choose fill. Click, drag, and drop. And to make this more apparent, let's make it a color red.

Same thing we're going to copy and paste it on the right side. The difference here is that we're going to check off channel. All right. So what are these settings mean? When you apply it here, if we look at the left, we've got this first value, which is our color value. It's a hex value. Alpha refers to the overall visibility of the layer.

This next option is what is applied on the right here, which is called use alpha channel. I'll explain what's happening there in a moment. And finally we've got the global opacity of only the color on the actual layer.

What does this use alpha channel? If we look over here on the right, we turn this off. Here's our full color image. Now in the black and white image, it makes it a little bit easier to see that in reality, there's shadows and highlights in our scene in our artwork.

If we check on use alpha channel, what it's going to do is take anything that falls into these blacks and grays, on the black to white scale, and it's going to make it transparent and see-through, and it's going to preserve the details that are in the white areas of our image.

Let's go ahead and turn our effect on, and you'll see that all of the black allows the red color to shine through and all of the white remains straight white. Whereas on the left side, If we turn off the use alpha channel, it's basically just applying a solid color, solid fill using the bounds of the artwork of the layer that we've applied it to.