Uploading images and alpha masks separately. That, or support .gif

Now, I know that with Photoshop, you can follow the tutorial to the letter and get a nice spiffy .TGA file with transparencies and whatnot. But wait! Suppose you don't have the right edition of Photoshop, and you can't save .TGA properly, and/or you really have no resources for making this happen? As things stand, the response is "sucks to be you."

I see two possible solutions: one, we either upload two files in one: one as the "main" image, and the other as the "alpha" image and whatnot, and then it gets "compiled" into one image with transparencies after the upload. The other possibilty is to support .GIF images, which already has transparencies of its own.

GIF is actually a proprietary format with licensing problems (despite the number of graphic programs that support it without paying the licensing fee). You might want to go for PNG instead.

neko

You might also want to consider getting The Gimp . Its a great image editting program, runs under Windows (and most other OS's), and is completely free.

- Ace

Here's a nice tip for you. Save your image as a PNG with full transparency. GIF's a bad idea because you only have two choices for each pixel: fully transparent and fully opaque. Now download ImageMagick from here: http://www.imagemagick.org/script/index.php . Install it and use the included "convert" program to convert the file from a PNG to a TGA:

convert something.png something.tga

That's it. ImageMagick figures out the correct alpha channel for the TGA to make it look like the PNG you saved. I think you can save a transparent PNG from photoshop elements.

Hmm ... I have the GIMP already, but I'm not exactly sure how to use it to make .TGAs properly ...

But I think I will download ImageMagick ... now, if only you could save directly from PSD to TGA with that (I have Adobe Photoshop Elements, which doesn't seem to do TGAs properly).

Photoshop 7.0 has broken TGA support. It's fixed in the 7.0.1 patch, which really only reverts the TGA DLL to the 6.0 version. Perhaps your problem is also fixed by applying an update?

Just a quick note on making tgas with the Gimp...

When you go to save off your Gimp file, simply append '.tga' to the filename, and basically that's it. You will be prompted to export the file rather than save, because tga will lose some information (layers etc) from your original, then asked if you want to use compression (no) and where the origin should be (doesn't matter AFAICS).

Anything transparent in your original will remain transparent in your tga, as you would expect. Personally I find it much more straightforward than the system employed by Photoshop.

Aleks

Well, the Targa plugin said 6.0.0 when I looked at the info ... I really have no idea what the problem is.