Previously, we discussed about layer properties, but we haven't discussed about one particular layer locking property, which is the alpha inheritance. If you want to follow along right away, just open the file I provided for the previous lesson, which is this file. Okay, we can turn on or off alpha inheritance by clicking on the symbol that looks like a small a letter or alpha symbol. This property, if it is on will make the transparency of the current layer to follow the transparency of the layers below it and not actually just one layer below it, but it will follow all of the visible layers below it in the layer stack. To understand this more clearly, in the file I provided, you will see one layer that has the yellow circle and another layer with a green circle overlapping the yellow circle. For now, just hide the white background layer so we have mostly transparent area like this.

Now, let's create a new layer on top of the green circle layer thick a solid brush, press D to set the black color as the foreground color. And let's draw some black colored strokes like this. Okay, notice how this black pixels just block everything below it, including the transparent area. Now watch when I turn the alpha inheritance on. By having the alpha inheritance on the black pixels in this layer can only be visible if there is a visible pixels in the layers below it. If we hide the green circle layer, the black pixels on that area will be hidden also, if we hide the yellow circle layer, it will hide the black pixels on top of that yellow circle.

Now if we unhide The white background layer, we can see all of the black pixels strokes become visible. This is because this white background layer has solid white color feel the entire layer. So again, alpha inheritance will make the current layers poseability controlled by the visibility of the layers below it. If you used Photoshop before, the alpha inheritance concept in Krita is almost similar with the clipping mask concept in Photoshop. Okay. Now what if we want to see the white background layer but still want to constrain the black pen colors only on these two circles?

Well, we can do this by using the group layer. In fact, in most cases, you will need to create a group layer to use alpha inheritance properly. There are two ways to create group layer manually or automatically first do this manually, we can click on this carrot button and then choose group layer in here. Okay, so this new layer is not a pain layer, but a special layer called group layer. We can tell if this is a group layer by its icon, we can see it has this small folder icon. While the pain layers have this pen and paper icons, we can rename a group layer, just like with any other layer.

To put these three layers inside the new group layer, we need to select all of them first by clicking on this one and then hold SHIFT and click on this one. Then just drag them all and drop them when you see the target highlight blocking the layer like this, not like this, but when it looks like this, I hope you can see this in the video. When you release the mouse, the three layers we direct before we leave Inside the group layer. Another way to insert these layers is by using these buttons. Let me undo this first. Okay, so just like before, we need to select all of these three layers, we can click on this one, hold CTRL and then click on this one and this one also, then just click this move up button and creator will put all of them inside the group layer.

Okay, so those are the manual methods. Let me undo again a couple of times. Okay, the automatic and faster way to encapsulate all of these three layers into a layer group is by using shortcut Ctrl G, but first, we need to make sure that these layers are selected, then press Ctrl G. As you can see, we have a new group layer created by Krita automatically and all of our layers are already inside it. If you forget the shortcut, you can also use right click method. Let me undo again, select all of these layers as always, then right click, and then choose group and then choose quick group in here, we now have these three layers inside a group just like before, after we have all of them encapsulated inside a group, as we can see, by grouping these three layers, and these top layers of our inheritance is on the black color stalks in this layer are only controlled by these two layers below it inside the same group.

The white background layer has no effect on these layers of inheritance, because this background layer is outside of this group, therefore get ignored. This technique is very important when we need to create a non destructive digital painting which we are going to cover later. Project lessons