I'm having trouble with transparency.

I am trying to make a railing texture. I made it in Photoshop 6.0 and it's really pretty, but when I try to save it into either .jpg, .bmp, or .tga it loses the transparent parts. They just turn white. It's really frustrating because I want to upload them, and when I go to do it the transparent parts are white. What am I doing wrong?

well jpg doesn't support transparency. bmp does but i don't think you can save transparent bmps from Photoshop. you want a 32 bit tga for transparency.

the background is white, yeah. it does that if you don't have anything in the transparent areas of your image when you save it. is it white when you upload it? those areas might still be transparent but the program you're viewing them in doesn't show it.

i dunno if you know but you can upload and preview an image for free before you pay the L$10 to really upload it so take a look.

Thanks.

But that doesn't work. For some reason, every time I save it in .TGA it doesn't turn out transparent. Maybe it's the version of Photoshop I have, but I feel like there should be some way around it.

I know that you can preview, that's what I've been doing. If I had to pay L$10 everytime I've previewed I would be broke by now. Thanks though.

Are you creating an alpha channel, in the Channels tab of the Layers window? Unless you've got one created there, it'll just fill transparent areas with white, 24- or 32-bit. Also, only one alpha channel can apply... I'm not sure what'll happen if you try to save it with multiple alpha channels.

If you're already doing all this... then your Photoshop sounds borked. My copy of Photopoop 6 doesn't seem to have any trouble with .tga transparencies...

Also: /109/0a/27512/1.html

Hey William,

Here’s a list of things it might be, all of which I still catch myself forgetting to do on occasion. Doh!

First, have you made an Alpha layer in the channels tab of the image? This is the grayscale layer that tells what level of transparency the image should have. White is solid, black is clear, and shades of gray are everything in-between.

Is the Alpha layer turned on when you save? It will show up as a red haze over what will be clear in the final image.

Are all other layers not in use off when you save? You should be seeing the checkerboard background thru the red haze where the image is transparent.

Are you saving as a TGA 32bit? 24bit will not save the Alpha channel.

Hope you can get it working, good luck

KX

hey William,

i've run into some issues with Photoshop as well. I've found that Paint Shop Pro is much easier to use with respect to transparency. There are some quirks - PSP does randomly crash on me from time to time, and some aspects of the user interface aren't as flexible as PS, but you may want to give it a try...(it's much less expensive than PS as well).

Best of luck to you!