Opening TGA file and they are black??

I have some TGA files which should have a transparent background, however after saving them to my hard drive and opening them with Photoshop they turn black, what am I doing wrong?

This really should be in Texturing Tips not here.

In any case, what are the images in question? Are they tattoos perhaps? The reason I ask is that it's extremely common for SL tattoo images to be made simply by flooding the canvas with black, and then painting the design in white on the alpha channel. If you open such an image in Photoshop, it will look completely black at first glance. This is because the color channels have nothing to do with transparency. Transparency in this context is governed by the alpha channel, and only the alpha channel.

It's perfectly normal for Photoshop not to display visible transparency in TGA files, by default, even if an alpha channel is present. The reason is because alpha channels don't automatically have to mean transparency. That happens to be the only thing SL uses them for (at present), but other programs use them for all kinds of things. Photoshop is smart enough not to make any assumptions about what any particular alpha channel might be for, so it displays color information in TGA's as opaque.

On the Channels palette, take a look at what's there. Is there an alpha channel present? If there is, take a look at it. Is it black where the transparency is supposed to be, and white where the opaque parts are supposed to be. If so, then all is as it should be. If not, then I'd need to know more about what you're doing in order to pinpoint what's going wrong.

If you need more information on what alpha channels are, how they work, and how to make them, see the transparency guide, stickied at the top of the Texturing Tips forum.


Also, what version of Photoshop are you using? If it's 7.0, it won't handle TGA files properly. 7.0 was flawed in several ways, necessitating patch to be released not long after the version first came out. If you've got 7.0, upgrade it to 7.0.1 via the free patch from adobe.com.

I'm using 5.5 when I go to the channels and click on the Alpha channel the part that is not supposed to be transparent shows up and everything else is black. I'm not sure what to do?

Sounds like you've got your channel masking options reversed. What you need to do is open your Channel Options dialog, and change the Color Indicates toggle to Masked Areas. Chances are it's on Selected Areas right now, which is backwards.

In more recent versions of Photoshop, you can open the Channel Options dialog in two ways. One is to double-click on the alpha channel's thumbnail. The other is to pull down the Channels palette's menu by left-clicking on the little icon at its upper right, the one that looks like a small triangle with three lines next to it. I'm not sure if it was the same in 5.5. That's going back almost 10 years.

I'd strongly suggest you upgrade. It's pretty miraculous that 5.5 even works at all on a modern OS.