How to make a transparent moon?

[mistertaylor]

Hello,

How can I make take an image of the moon and make the background (including where the sky shows through the craters) transparent? I feel like I'm missing something obvious...

So my steps have been to duplicate the image, apply a layer adjustment to make it greyscale and then apply a threshold layer adjustment to limit to black and white with the moon being white and the "sky" being black - this is my mask. I've tried numerous ways of applying this mask to the original image (eg "mask to below", manually adding a mask, etc), but none actually perform the mask and the image remains unchanged. Please help!

 

Moon.afphoto

[thomaso]

Hi @mistertaylor,
welcome to the Affinity Forums!

Layers of type "Image" don't work this way as mask (are rather just a rectangle). To use your prepared setup you can choose via right-click "Rasterize to Mask" (+ then move / nest the layer as wanted).

Alternatively you could select directly the black (e.g. with Flood Select Tool) + invert the selection + click the "Mask" button in the Layers panel.

[v_kyr]

Well, there are several (many) different ways possible to accomplish this, one of them would be to ...

• Rasterize first the image  (so it get's a pixel layer)
• Select -> Tonal Range -> Select Shadows and/or Select Midtones and then delete the selection (black tonal areas are deleted and will get complete transparent)
• Making also a selective color adjustment after the black color and giving it -100%
• ...
• Further ...
• ... playing with the layers transparency setting and blend modes if wanted ...
• ... etc. etc.

• Moon_play.afphoto

[Done]

.

 

[mistertaylor]

Thank you! Is there a way to keep the adjustment layers and still have the mask? Rasterising them merges the layers and makes them non-editable.

[Done]

.

 

[thomaso]

18 minutes ago, Return said:

Infinite possibilities when changing layers in the stack with blendmodes and blendranges.
Just play.

I think the missing point in this play is the masking of the black background. Note, the two adjustments in the OP's file were apparently created to affect the masking area only, not the entire / visible moon.

[thomaso]

2 hours ago, mistertaylor said:

Is there a way to keep the adjustment layers and still have the mask? Rasterising them merges the layers and makes them non-editable.

I am not sure if this simplified workaround works for your needs as wanted. Instead of a Mask layer it uses blend mode "Erase" for the grouped adjustment (and thus doesn't need the B&W adjustment) + blend range curves for both the erasing group and the threshold layer.

Moon_erase.afpub

[mistertaylor]

Perfect - thank you for your responses - I think the blend option was the "best" solution.