Elements Semi-Transparency

I'm pretty smug about how successfully I've been able to finesse PSElements 4 into doing some very sophisticated things, and have postponed buying Up to Grownup Photoshop. But I've hit a wall -- I have been unable to import a semi-transparent alpha channel (well, not realy a "channel" in Elements, but a Layer with grey content that's meant to be translucent) to SL as a texture: the grey images appear totally transparent -- OR show up without any of the opaque content at all, depending on what combination of actions I perform. Is it possible that the secret capability of Elements to create alphas simply cannot accommodate semi-transparency? Grateful for any advice...

For anyone else using Elements and wondering about the same semi-transparency issue: I FINALLY found the answer after MONTHS of experimentation: a semi-transparent selection CAN indeed be saved to a channel that exports in .tga as an alpha -- BUT you can't see it! The program tells you that more than 50% of the pixels selected are invisible so the outline won't be visible -- and it's right: no marching ants. Load a selection of any semi-transparency onto a layer (save it from a layer with its own Master Opacity, or just select the semi-transparent areas from a layer with mixed transparencies in the image) -- do not make it grey, do not look for marching ants, do not do another thing to it -- and save the file as tga-32. The file will upload to SL with the selected area that was invisible on its own alpha layer, at the chosen transparency. There is no logical, intuitive, systematic reason why this works, but it does -- maybe Adobe simply wants Elements users to really WORK for our cheap Consumer Edition privileges, going on endless, tedious wild goose chases for marching ants...

The stickies are wonderful resources.

Please see /109/32/80851/1.html , post #2, search for Elements in that post.

A

Persephone, I had the same problem for sometime. I do all my work in PSE4 but when I need something to be transparent, I just pop open GIMP and work with it there, save it and then back to PSE4. Yes, I know I am doing a few more steps than I need to do but I am so use to doing it that way at the present, I hardly know the difference now. Maybe this weekend I will try the method you mentioned and see how well I can get my mind to work with it. Take care and have a great day.
Kat