cs3 alpha hell

There was a thread on this before but didnt answer my question...

I was using ps7 before i moved to cs3 so i could easily save my alpha images, but now it seems like some kind of gong show to do...

I've read through the help files but only seems to show how to make one before you actually start your image


How do I save my image as an alpha tga?

I have all my layers, with a transparent background and need to save them all individually as alphas...

Only thing in my channels are rgb, r, g, b

I've tried making an alpha channel, merging it, saving 1 billion different ways all resulting in a flattened image which is useless to me, anyone have any advice on how exactly i go about this?

I'm not going to give you the "THERE ARE THREADS ABOUT THIS ALREADY" thing, but I also don't know if I'll be giving completely valid info because I use cs2.

Try this....
Select everything you want to keep in the image. (Stuff you don't not selected obviously.)
Go into your channels thingy and click the thing that looks like the new layer button. You should get a new channel, probably called alpha 1.
Fill the selection in with white. (parts of the image you want gone should be black unless you want it partially transparent. I do the gimp thing I listed below for that. I'm a slacker)
Go back to your layers and deselect everything.
Make a new layer behind it that's at least 50% gray. (I use black but that might not work so well with something white.) This keeps the ugly white halo away.
Save it as a 32 bit targa file.

Alternatively if this process is too painful just save the PSD with all the layers that you don't want hidden and load it into the gimp. It automagically makes your alpha channel even if your creation is partially transparent.

I really hope this helps.

Well considering ill be using this often i may as well get gimp, or lose cs3 and reinstall ps 7, thx for the help.

ok, well i tried gimp, and now of course that has to be a big issues of having hyper threading setup and downloading gtk and after all that it still wont install this is madening.....

anyhow decided to try your way, so i selected my image, went to filters, made a new one called alpha one, which on the screen was all in black covering my image, there are options with this alpha image which you didnt mention, theres masked area, selected area and spot colour....a color picker and a transparency level, since you never mentioned these im assuming i leave them as is?

so with my new black image you say to fill the selected are white which, i tried to, on every area and it does nothing....so your going to have to be a bit more detailed on how to do this if you can. cause this aint working for me.

Sabane, you can add yourself to the long list of victims who have been handicapped by Photoshop 7.0's short lived auto-alpha experiment and thus don't how to make real alpha channels (in ANY program). If it makes you feel any better, you're certainly not alone. Lots of people have been similarly harmed by 7.0. That version was only available for a few short months out of Photoshop's near 20-year history, but man, did it ever cause its share of lasting headaches (and still does).

Anyway, welcome to the world of real alpha channels. It will take a little bit for you to get used to the process, but I can guarantee you're gonna like it much better on this side of the fence. You have so much more control over your imagery at your finger tips now, you can't even imagine.

Plus, you now have the benefit that your TGA's will be 100% compatible with all programs. Those 7.0 TGA's are unique, and are not compatible with anything other than Photoshop 7.0. It's only by a miracle of timing that SL can even read them at all. SL just happened to be released at the same time 7.0 was current. Had it been a few months earlier or a few months later, it would be a totally different story.

By the way, don't fall into the trap of believing it's going to take you longer now, as many 7.0 users who don't know any better would have you believe. Making real alpha channels takes no more time than what you were doing before. In fact, you'll find that with a great many images, it's significantly faster. In most cases, it's never more than a 2-click operation.

I'd encourage you to read through the Transparency Guide at the top of the forum. It contains no less than four complete step-by-step tutorials for making proper alpha channels in Photoshop (any version other than 7.0, including CS3), along with all the explanatory background information about how channels work that you could ever want.

I apologize that the guide has become somewhat hard to read since LL recently turned off bbCode on the forums. They effectively destroyed the formatting, and left all bbCode tags visible as text, which is very annoying. I'm working on porting all my tutorials over to my website, sltutorials.com, but it will be a little while yet before I can open the site up to the public. In the mean time, do your best to ignore those visible bbCode tags, and just read the content. If you have any questions, ask away.



Oh, and since it was brought up, don't bother with GIMP. Since you're used to Photoshop, learning to use GIMP is going to be a nightmare for you. Its interface is completely bizarre. Those who know Photoshop can learn pretty much any other commercial image editor in a matter of hours, but not GIMP. GIMP is its own animal, completely. By the time you finish tearing all your hair out over the interface, you could have made thousands of images in Photoshop.

Not to mention that while GIMP admittedly is very powerful, Photoshop overpowers it by at least tenfold, especially with all the new features in CS3. So don't go back to 7.0 and don't look to other programs like GIMP for your solution. Just invest an hour or so into learning how to make a proper alpha channel, and you'll be set for life. And as I said, feel free to ask questions. Lots of us are here to help.

Sabane

The Alpha channel is easier to explain as a step by step scenario.

Send me a IM in world and hopefully we can link up and I will give you an example.

It may help if your computer can run SL and CS3 at the same time so you can switch and follow the steps.

CS3 and CS2 in my opinion are extremely easy, there are also plugins for alpha on CS2, not sure if CS3 plugins are available.

Hope I can help

thx for the explanation...didnt realize there was a big faq up there, guilty look...


however i tried them and theyre not working...

I did method one and two, all seemed to be working right as it explained...not sure about the lastpart, after deselecting my image and creating a new dark layer under my image at 50 trans...i save load back into cs3 and theyre are flattened, both method 1 and 2 when finished when brought back into cs3 looked flattened...

so either i missed something or i can't see how they would be real alpha images and look flat? will it be a real alpha image in sl? i have no idea why this isnt working for me


method 3 is with linking layers i only have 1 layer so nothing to link

Maybe it's possible cs3 does it a bit different than these methods? i'll paste the help file here, might be help for others as for me i need a break before my i break my keyboard over my head, then ill see what i did wrong....


Create and edit alpha channel masks:

You can create a new alpha channel and then use painting tools, editing tools, and filters to create a mask from the alpha channel. You can also save an existing selection in a Photoshop image as an alpha channel that appears in the Channels palette. See Save and load selections.

Create an alpha channel mask using current options:

Click the New Channel button at the bottom of the Channels palette.
Paint on the new channel to mask out image areas.
Select areas of the image before you create the channel for the mask. Then paint on the channel to refine the mask.

Create an alpha channel mask and set options:

Alt-click (Windows) or Option-click (Mac OS) the New Channel button at the bottom of the Channels palette, or choose New Channel from the Channels palette menu.
Specify options in the New Channel dialog box.
Paint on the new channel to mask out image areas.

Channel options:

To change options for an existing channel, double-click the channel thumbnail in the Channels palette.

Options available in the New Channel and Channel Options dialog boxes:

Masked areas Sets masked areas to black (opaque) and selected areas to white (transparent). Painting with black increases the masked area; painting with white increases the selected area. When this option is selected, the Quick Mask button in the toolbox becomes a white circle on a gray background .

Selected Areas Sets masked areas to white (transparent) and selected areas to black (opaque). Painting with white increases the masked area; painting with black increases the selected area. When this option is selected, the Quick Mask button in the toolbox becomes a gray circle on a white background

Spot Color Converts an alpha channel to a spot color channel. Only available for existing channels.

Color Sets the color and opacity of the mask. Click the color field to change the color. The color and opacity settings affect only the appearance of the mask and have no effect on how underlying areas are protected. Changing these settings may make the mask more easily visible against the colors in the image.

Paint on a channel to mask image areas
When the new channel appears at the bottom of the Channels palette, it is the only channel visible in the image window. Click the eye icon for the composite color channel (RGB, CMYK) to display the image with a color overlay showing the mask.

Select the brush or an editing tool and do one of the following to add or subtract from the mask created from the alpha channel:
To remove areas in the new channel, paint with white.

To add areas in the new channel, paint with black.

To add or remove areas using opacities less than 100%, set the opacity in the options bar of the painting or editing tool and then paint with white or black. You can also paint with a color to achieve lower opacities.

TGA files are inherently layerless. They're always flat. TGA's have no idea that layers even exist. All they know about is channels.

So take a look at the channels palette. Is there an alpha channel present? If so, then you probably did everything right.


Again, TGA files are always flat. Were they to contain layers, they wouldn't be TGA's.

I'm getting the feeling though that that's not what you're really asking about. It sounds like what you're wondering is why you're not seeing the alpha transparency in Photoshop. That's a common question. I really should have included it in the FAQ. Sorry about that.

The reason your TGA's always look opaque in Photoshop is that alpha channels don't always mean transparency. They could mean literally anything. SL always interprets them as transparency, but to another program they might mean bumpiness or shininess or displacement or anything else you could think of.

Most programs that use TGA's do use them the way SL does, but it's in no way an absolute standard. So Photoshop is smarter than to make assumptions. Knowing that that channel might mean anything under the sun, Photoshop does not automatically display it as transparency. Don't worry though; that doesn't mean it's not there. As long as the alpha channel is present, the transparency data for SL is in place, and SL will read the file just fine. If you want proof of that, view the file from SL's upload previewer and you'll see (assuming the image was indeed made correctly).

If you want to actually see the transparency in Photoshop you can, but as I said, it's not automatic. What you'll need to do is simply copy the alpha channel to a layer mask. Open your TGA and go to the Layers palette. Double click on the background layer to change it to a regular layer. Now go to the Channels palette and ctrl-click the alpha channel's thumbnail to select the channel. Go back to the Layers palette and click on the "Add layer mask" button at the bottom (the one that looks like a gray rectangle with a white circle in the middle). Voila. You're now seeing the transparency, exactly as it will appear in SL. Just remember to delete the mask before you close the file.

If you want to make changes to the mask, by the way, go right ahead. You can then copy the mask back to an alpha channel, using the procedure explained in Method 3.



Well, you'll only have one layer in your exported TGA, that's true, but in your working image document you probably have many layers. Even if you don't though, it doesn't matter. The important part is the use of the mask, not the grouping of the layers. You could apply the mask to a group of a million layers or just to one single layer and the functionality is the same.



Nope; it's exactly the same in CS3 as in all other versions of Photoshop, except for 7.0. The principles behind TGA files have been in place for 18 years, completely unchanged. Adobe tried to change the rules with 7.0, and they ended up creating a lot of problems. That particular experiment was a dismal failure.

Channel logic is one of the rare examples in computing of something that was gotten right the first time, which is why it's still around after all this time. It's not necessarily intuitive at first if you're brand new to thinking this way, but it's really very simple and elegant. It just works. Once you get used to it you'll be thrilled with what you can do with it. I know it probably doesn't seem that way right now, but trust me, you'll get it.



In any case, since the written tutorials maybe aren't working so well for you yet, have you watched Robin's video tutorial? Maybe seeing it in action will do the trick for you. The link is in the transparency guide, but it's so hard to read the thing right now without formatting, you might have missed it. Here it is again if you need it:

http://www.robinwood.com/Catalog/Technical/SL-Tuts/SLPages/TranspSL.html