1307invert

go for it! looks cool, and is definitely different from the previous one. Yours is more "shiny", whereas the other has a duller gold.

I really should go get one of those Staples "Easy Buttons" right now, and slam it against my forehead. What I wasn't understanding before was that it was using a black-to-white gradient scale and transferring/transforming that to a clear-to-opaque gradient scale (basically, right?) and now I understand why pretty much everyone uses it! I think what made me not realize it earlier was that most of the tutorials I looked at used alpha-mask in a very black-and-white only manner, so I didn't see that it was changing the opacity. Your post or whatever it is here: Sarkut's tutorial on alpha mask helped me out a lot! Thanks!

Hello everybody, I'm rather new here (yes, stereotypical to say that, but its true) and I have a question about Masking: What is it?? I went to the newbie playground and searched there, but i couldn't find anything specifically describing what it is. All the tutorials I've tried use it, especially the ever-present Alpha Mask effect, but none that I've seen really explain why we use it, they just tell you to. Personally, I like to understand the concepts that make what I'm doing work! Could someone give a nice, specific definition, and maybe explain what exactly it does? If this is a redundant post, please, feel free to redirect me, but as far as I could tell, nothing really explained it. Thank you all for your time!