Lock Transparency in Pixelmator Pro

Avoid painting on the transparent part of the image

March 31, 2023 by cryan.com

Pixelmator Pro is an excellent image editing software that provides powerful tools to enhance your images. One of the many features of Pixelmator Pro is the ability to preserve transparency on images. By doing so, you can maintain the original background of your image while editing it. In this blog post, we will discuss how to preserve transparency on images in Pixelmator Pro.

Note: In Affinity Designer/Photo this is call Protect Alpha.

Why Do This?

I have been trying to find a way to change the black color of a text image from black to white, and I thought that the best way to do this would be to use the paint brush, but I only wanted to paint the text and none of the background.

The best way would be to lock the transparency and then paint away. Locking the transparency will allow you to only paint the text and not the background, because the paint brush will be confined to the boundaries of the text. This will make sure that the text is painted, while the background is left untouched.

Enabling Transparency

Here are the steps to lock the transparency on a layer in Pixelmator Pro.

Option 1:

• Select a Layer
• In the top menu bar, select Format, then Image then "Preserve Transparency"

Option 1

Option 2:

• Select a Layer
• Right-click on the layer and select "Preserve Transparency"

Option 2