Making text transparent

I would do that like this:

Add your image as a bottom layer (background or Layer 0  it doesn't matter

Use the rectangular shape tool to make the white rectangle (so in the options bar - no stroke  but white fill)

Add your text above that

So so far we have this:

Next, click on the text layer and shift click on the rectangle layer so both are selected

Right click and in the menu choose "Group from layers"

Your text and rectangle layers are now in a group

All that remains is to use the text to knock a hole through the white rectangle so

Select the text layer and right click.

Choose blending options

Change Fill opacity to 0% and knockout to shallow. Shallow knockout cuts a hole through the layers below that are in the group (in this case the rectangle) but not through the layers outside the group

Click OK Job done.

The advantage of this method is that the text remains editable.

If you also want the white to be semi-transparent just click on the rectangle layer and , in the layers panel, reduce the opacity

Dave

Hi

You didn't post a link to the tutorial, so we don't know what it says. Your mistake was to go to the image layer and delete the pixels from that layer. Some other things you said don't make sense, such as when you made the beach layer a background layer, it shouldn't have transparency as it does later.

Can you post a link to the tutorial? You might also go through it one more time, checking your steps.

In the NYC image, it looks like they have a white box with opacity that you don't have. The text may have been rasterized. The deletion of the text would have been done on the layer with the white box, not on the background layer.

~ Jane