NotePeople in the game development industry should be familiar with the concept of an alpha channel, and to those people I must warn: UltraPaint does not currently support editing the alpha channel of 32-bit images. Generally UltraPaint will ignore that channel altogether, but how UltraPaint treats the alpha channel is, in fact, undefined and I haven't tested to make sure all the drawing operations leave it alone. Generally, alpha blending in the context of this program refers to blending something in the selection layer with the image layer.
You've probably seen colored glass before. It appears to have a color, but if you put something immediately behind it, you can see what is behind as well. The computer equivalent of this effect is alpha blending, and it means that what you draw is semitransparent.
Everything you draw in UltraPaint has an alpha channel value, and by default that value is 0 (opaque). By increasing it, you can make what you draw to appear semitransparent. It isn't difficult to use; an example illustration is shown below. If you use a gradient, the amount of alpha for both the left and right colors is also factored into the gradient.
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Before you can use alpha blending, you have to check
"Enable alpha blending" on the main window. The sliders on the right side of the color boxes indicate how much alpha blending to use. Toward the right is more opaque; toward the left is more transparent. |
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