Mask options

	Mr. Edison is masked with a rectangular mask here. It is a Vector mask. It is important to understand that the result of the masking depends upon the settings in the Object panel for the masking object.

The properties inspector tells you that the mask we are editing is a vector mask.

There are two choices for displaying vector masks:

1. Path outline
2. Grayscale appearance

Let's see what differences these settings make.

Path outline will show the stroke around the path (if there is one set) as it would in a normal vector object.

Grayscale appearance will take black pixels as transparent and white pixels as opaque. The grayscale in-between shows according to the value of the pixel, the lighter the less visible the bitmap.

This can be used for great effects, for example you can feather the outline by having a stroke that vanishes:

	I just changed the option in the object panel with the same stroke settings as before. You can see how the stroke works as a grayscale mask. The fill also reacts the same way. In the examples so far there was a solid black fill. This is why the entire picture shows in this example. Let's change the fill of the mask to be a radial fill: Black, White.

	Select the mask object - remember you just need to click on it in the layers panel. Adjust the fill settings in the fill panel as shown on the left. We apply a radial fill, black white. The result is shown in the next picture, right here:

The standard radial fill shows black in the middle, that's why we see his face, and white on the outside. We can adjust the radial fill by dragging the fill handle:

You can adjust the fill so more of the face shows. You could also edit the fill in the fill panel by using the Edit button and adjusting the range of the fill.

When you slide the black color further to the right more solid black is in the masking object, therefore more of the image will be showing.

You can convert a vector mask into a bitmap mask or create bitmap masks from scratch. These masks work like vector masks and will show a combination of the pixels of the masking bitmap and the image behind. You can choose to use the brightness values of the masking bitmap to be applied as "Alpha" which means that darker pixels or use the grayscale as described in the vector masks.