How to Adjust Opacity in Adobe Photoshop

Opacity is the amount of transparency that exists in an image. If an image has 100% opacity it is not transparent at all. As you decrease the amount of opacity it becomes more transparent. You may want to lighten an image so you can add text or another image in another layer and blend the two together.

Difficulty: Moderately Easy

Instructions

Things You'll Need:

• Adobe Photoshop 6.0 or later running on a Mac or PC.
• A copy of an image for editing.

1. 
    
   Layer panel

   Open your image in Adobe Phototshop. You will notice the LAYERS PANEL shows your image as BACKGROUND. If you can not see the LAYERS PANEL, navigate to the WINDOWS tab and click SHOW LAYERS.

2. 
    
   New Duplicate Layer

   Under the LAYERS tab click DUPLICATE LAYERS and you will see the dialog box that will allow you to name the layer or to open the layer in a new document.

3. 
    
   New Layer

   Notice that each layer has a slider control for opacity. You can also lock a layer to retain the detail in that layer. Notice the background layer is locked. Double click on layer 1 to open the LAYER STYLE Palette.

4. 
    
   Layer Palette

   We can now adjust the opacity of Layer 1 using the slider or by typing in a number. Change the blend mode to SCREEN and lower the opacity to 80 making the image more transparent and useful as a background in a page make up program or on a web page.

5. 
    
   After opacity adjustment

   Notice the image thumbnail of LAYER 1 is lighter and more transparent than the BACKGROUND image. We can now merge these two layers into one by selecting FLATTEN IMAGE from the LAYER drop down menu.

6. 
    
   Final image

   Once the image is flattened the two layers are merged into one layer creating a new image that is more transparent and suitable as a background.

Tips & Warnings

• After the image is flattened, you can still add new text layers or other image layers.
• Undo or use the history palette if you don't like the image.
• Once you save the flattened image, you can't revert to the previous opacity.
• Images with opacity of less than 50% will be A "ghost" image. Sometimes this is a good effect, but often it just creates visual confusion.

Resources

• Adobe Photoshop

[momandpopoften]

on 8/3/2008 I've always wondered how you could get that effect! Thanks!

[LilacGirl]

on 8/1/2008 Interesting.