from PS 7.0 to cs3 TGA white background

I have been using 7.0 forever then I got a hairbrain idea to buy cs3. It's nice yes. However when I open my previous files within it saved as tga.. there is a white background where it should have been none.
Also, when I save to disk in world this happens as well... My only option is to open up ps7.0 and resave as png.

Is there any way to avoid this, perhaps within the cs3 program? I have tons of tga files and opening in 7.0 then loading cs3 is really time consuming.

I think I have seen something on this in previous postings but could not find it..

Hello Tarina.

Read the stickied transparency guide at the top of the forum. Photoshop 7.0 was highly flawed in the way it treated TGA files. It remained that way for all of about three months before Adobe repaired the problem with the 7.0.1 patch. But since you've been using 7.0 all this time, you've never known what you've been missing.

The technical explanation is in the sticky, so I won't bother repeating it here. What I will say here is this. Embrace alpha channels, and welcome this opportunity learn how to use them. You've skated by without all this time because your version of Photoshop happened to have been broken in such a way that you could avoid it. Things are going to be a little uncomfortable for you now in the short term, while you're making the necessary mental adjustments. But once you get past that, and you join how the rest of the world works, you'll be much better off than you were before; trust me.

Alpha channel work flow is very, very easy, bit it does take a little getting used to. If you have questions along the way, by all means, ask.


EDIT: I forgot to mention that the transparency information in your old TGA's may well still be there. Take a look at the Channels palette in PS CS3 for each image. Is there an alpha channel there, and is its white area shaped like the opaque part of the image? If so, then it's all good. If not, then converting to PNG or some other simple-transparency format in 7.0 would be your best bet for archival purposes. 7.0 TGA's are a bit unpredictable.

It's also happening in textures that I have purchased full perm.. and thank you I will double check the ones I got.

yeah, just save em as PNG and the problem is fixed, couldnt be simpler.

It's perfectly normal for Photoshop not to display transparency in TGA files. The reason is that alpha channels do not always mean transparency. That happens to be the only thing SL uses them for, but in other programs, the alpha channel data could be interpreted to mean any number of things. Photoshop (except for 7.0) is smart enough not to make guesses about what you might want any particular alpha channel to be for. So by default, it shows you only the color channels. That's why your purchased textures look totally opaque.

Take a look at the channels palette. If the alpha channel is there, your image has a transparency map. If you want to see its effects, there are two ways to do it. The fastest is simply to turn on its visibility. The masked areas in the image will turn red, and the opaque areas will remain their normal color.

If the red isn't enough for you, and you really must see the transparency as actual visible transparency, then do the following:

1. In the Layers palette, double-click the background layer to turn it into a normal layer.

2. In the Channels palette, ctrl-click on the alpha channel's thumbnail to select everything in the channel.

3. In the Layers palette, click the Make New Mask From Selection button at the bottom of the palette. A layer mask will be applied to your background layer, as an exact copy of the alpha channel. Since the only function of layer masks is transparency, the mask will display the alpha channel data as transparency. Think of this as the manual way to do what SL does when it reads the alpha channel data.

4. Before you close the image file, remember to delete the mask you just created. If you save it with the mask applied, you'll likely end up with a white halo around the opaque parts of the image, since you will have destroyed the bleed area by masking it away. Remember, SL will pull the transparency information from the alpha channel, and nothing but the alpha channel. The color channels themselves are always opaque.


You'll, find, by the way, that the reverse of the above procedure is a great way to make alpha channels. Start with a mask, paint your transparency onto it however you want, and then copy the mask to an alpha channel as your final step before export to TGA. It only takes one extra mouse-click over doing it other ways, and you get to work with WYSIWYG the whole time.