Partially/Fully/and not Transparant in 1 PS document

Hello oh wise ones

I have been pretty succesful creating transparant, and partially transparant images in PS.

My question today is how would I go about creating 1 document with pieces that are partially transparant along with pieces that are fully transparant....Along with pieces that are not transparant.

When I attempt this I get either my partial transparant portion or my full tranparant portion. I cant get all 3 at the same time.

Thanks as always for any advise

Cheers!

-j

I’m not sure exactly what you’re asking but I’ll give it a shot

Variations in transparency for a texture in Photoshop are done with the shading of the Alpha channel.

If you are trying to make a garment or texture with solid sections, cut away sections, and sheer sections, you would need to make an Alpha channel for the image to reflect that.

On the Alpha channel white is solid, back is transparent and shades of grey are everything in between. In other words, the areas you want to be solid should be white, the sheer sections gray and what you don’t want to see should be black.

You will not see the transparency effect of the Alpha channel in PS and it takes a bit of practice and trail and error to get a feel of how it will look in SL. When the Alpha channel is active it will appear as a red haze where things are to be transparent but it will not appear transparent.

Hope this helps. There are some great posts here that go into detail on Alpha channel creation that should help you in how to make one. Like most things there are as many ways as there are users.

KX

Keith is quite right in what he says.

You can cause the alpha'd areas to appear in different colours (I go for black rather than red because my eyes interpret that more easily, and it means the colours of the item show through more clearly to me).

To my untrained intuition 50% transparent wasn't as transparent as I'd expect I seem to remember. Painting something with 128, 128, 128 50% grey produces a 50% transparent area by the numbers, but seems less than that when you look at it. I'm pretty sure this was an artefact of expectations: we don't really know what 50% transparent books look like, although they're easy to make (if not necessarily useful) in SL.

But if you think of painting in grey scale on the alpha channel, darker patches are more see through, you can mix them together easily even if they're not quite the effects you'd expect at first. You do that just like painting on a layer - you select on the layer the part you want to affect, then change to channel view, highlight the alpha channel and paint directly in there, in shades of grey.

Yep, it's all shades of gray in the Alpha Channel. If you don't know how to make one, I have a couple of video tutorials on my website here and here.

I've found that it's pretty easy to preview the transparency in Photoshop, too. Just make a copy of the document, merge all the layers, (don't flatten, merge them all,) and apply the Alpha Channel as a mask. (It shows how to do that in the second movie above.) Then you can look at the image against various background colors, and see how you did with the masking.

The real advantage to doing that (which isn't in the movie) is that you can change the transparency visually, on the fly, by selecting the mask, going to Image > Adjustment > Levels (or Command/ctrl L) and moving the gray point in the middle of the histogram.

As you do so, the gray areas in your image will become more or less opaque. When you have it just the way you want it, click OK, Select All, Copy the Layer Mask, return to your original document, select the Alpha Channel, Select All, and Paste. Ta-da! The perfect balance of transparency, just like that.

The software I have, Mac - Graphic Converter, and Photoshop Elements, wont handle gradients in Targa Alpha channels. PE doesnt seem to have any options for alpha channes in TGA's and Graphic Converter can only handle turning one color into an alpha channel.

I'm trying to make some simple light cones, for light fixtures, that fade out to invisible at the ends, but I cant make the texture myself. Does anyone have a texture they would be willing to give or sell to me, or maybe we can work out a trade. I make houses, gazebos, furniture, vehicles and original artwork. I need full permissions in order to include the lights with the houses I sell.

The photo below shows some of the light fixtures and cones I'm working on.

A better view of the house with light fixtures and local lighting turned on.

Well, it took some work, and some research, and I had to download the demo of Photoshop Elements; but the good news is that it does support 32 bit .tga files! (At least, the newest version does. I assume, from the research, that earlier versions worked the same way.)

Yes, it's true that there is no Channels Palette in Elements; but that doesn't mean there aren't any channels. You just can't see them.

It's a little different, and not as elegant (from my point of view,) but all you have to do is:


That's it! The file will have a perfect Alpha channel, although you won't be able to see it or check it until you get to the Preview pane of Second Life's upload texture dialog. But you'll see the checkerboard there, so you'll know it's worked before you spend your $L.



All the stuff you've seen in other threads about the "white halo" and how to avoid it will still apply. So, for instance, I highly recommend putting a layer the same color as your light below the light gradient. Just don't click on it when you're selecting the transparency.

So there you go! You can make your own images after all, which is good, since (guessing from the excellent work you've done with the rest of the textures) you'll never really be happy with someone else's stuff.

Hope this helps!

Wow thank you very much for going to all that trouble, and for the step by step instructions. PE help says hardly anything about alpha channels in it. I can't wait to try it out.

NP! I'm glad it was helpful.

I have to solve puzzles when I encounter them. It's my nature.

And I was sure that I'd heard or read somewhere that you could export Alpha channels from PE. So I had to find out how.

Let me know if you have more problems with it!

That's awesome, Robin. I had no idea PSE could do that. I'm not sure anyone on this forum did.

I guess now I'll have to stop being so brutal in my assessment of PSE when answering people's questions. It's good to know PSE can now be included in the ranks of useful programs for SL.

Thanks, Chosen!