The Channels Dialog
The Channels tab displays the three RGB channels, showing the current red, green or blue color values of each pixel in your image. The RGB channel thumbnails are grayscale representations of each color channel, where white represents 100% color, and black represents no color. The RGB channels each have an eye icon, so you can look at your image in a single color channel. Click off the eye icon in the Blue and Green channels, so that only the Red channel is visible. Bright red in the red channel is the equivalent of a maximum red value for that pixel; black means that the pixel has no red at all in it. If all three channels have maximum values for an area, that area is white. The RGB channels are always active when a layer is active, and they display the color values of all visible layers, not just the active one. Unlike layers, the RGB channels can all be active at the same time.You can also choose to work in one or two specific color channels, by clicking on the appropriate channels to activate the ones you want and deactivate the ones you don't want. You can create new channels by clicking the on the new button. This will bring up the New Channel dialog where you can set name, color and fill amount of the new channel. If you want to alter the values later on you just dubbel click on the channel which will bring up the Edit Channel Attributes dialog. Normally you don't work with extra channels but they can be very handy to create and store selections within. If you right click on the layer name you will be able to access the layer menu, with in the layer menu you have access to several other layer commands, see Index. An experienced user can also use them to crate patterns and to create advanced colored images with. The channel stack tools are more or less only useful when you work with those kind of images. #### Selections and Channels You are able to store a selection as a channel with the `right-click|Select|Save To Channel` command. If you do so a new channel will be created, and in that channel you can paint, and erase etc. When you have altered your channel you can turn it into a selection again. To turn it into a selection you just click on the Channel To Selection button. This is a very convenient way to alter selections and not to talk about store several selections. In fact you can create selections from scratch by creating a new channel, alter it and then apply Channel To Selection. Index