Clipping masks: Broken!

[Art Doerge]

Hi Emily,

My guess is that your text is not directly under the ‘content’ of the other layer. Either that or your text is exactly the same color as the ‘content’ of the other layer.

Remember that with a clipping mask, the non-transparent content of the base layer (your text in this case) reveals the content of the layer above it. So, if there is nothing directly above the text, the top layer will ‘seem’ to disappear. That would also happen if your text was the same color as what’s directly above it. And it doesn’t have to be text by the way 🙂

Try it again, but this time make sure your text is directly below some content on that upper layer and that your text is not the same color as what’s directly above it.

Hope this helps,

Art

[Keith Carmichael]

Thanks Art…

Actually though, none of those things were true, but I did find out something interesting.

It turns out that certain layer styles like color overlay actually sit ON TOP of other layers if those layers are clipped to the bottom layer.

Whew that was hard to explain.

Let’s say you have the word “puppies,” and then you have a layer with puppy spots on top of the word with a clipping mask, so the word has puppy spots.

But then you decide you want the word to be red in BETWEEN the puppy spots. So you put a red overlay on your text. (Why don’t you change the text color? I don’t know. Maybe it’s rasterized.)

The RED OVERLAY on the BOTTOM layer will sit ON TOP of the text layer AND the puppy spots layer above it. Puppy spots are gone!

I know, right? But that’s how it is.