Sorry, I need some more help.  I know some of you are frustrated with my "newbie" questions, so I've been trying to not bother you guys.

I've been managing pretty good with that online course at About.com, but I've run into a snag and I see others at the lesson forum have too, but no one has responded with an answer in a few months, so I doubt I'll be able to get my answer there.

Anyway, I'm working on a lesson that has to do with Alpha Channels. There is an image to download and I'm supposed to colour in the butterfly with the help of the alpha channels.

It's "Exercise 2"

http://graphicssoft.about.com/od/photoshop/l/bllps504i.htm

I opened the image.

I see 5 channels in the palette area in addition to the RGB, Red, Green and Blue channels.

I clicked on "Wing Outside" and made sure that the "eye" next to RGB was visible (so that I could see the image in colour and not in gray scale), and then clicked on the "Paint Can" and changed my desired colour to "Purple". But when I click on the area to flood fill, the square of colour that was purple changes to black.

Repeating the above, only this time instead of clicking on the channel in the palette area, I went to "Selection" and "Load Selection". I got the moving line around the area, and again when I tried to flood fill with Purple, the square of colour that was purple changed to black.

I have no idea how you use those saved channels in the palette area. I sure can't get them to flood fill with colour.

Can someone give me clearer instructions on how to do that? The lesson didn't cover flood filling the alpha channel selections, just creating them.

Here is the page prior to the Exercise.

http://graphicssoft.about.com/od/photoshop/l/bllps504h.htm
 

"It is good to see ourselves as others see us. Try as we may, we are never
able to know ourselves fully as we are, especially the evil side of us.
This we can do only if we are not angry with our critics but will take in good
heart whatever they might have to say." - Ghandi