Photoshop CS alpha problems

I'd just gotten Photoshop CS recently, and I'd been having trouble making alphas. With Photoshop 7, i'd just have the .psd have a transparent layer and then save it as a .tga. But with CS, when I do that it seems to flatten everything down just before saving and I end up with a white background getting added to the file.

Any ideas?

Pshop 7 borked the targa output so badly that v7.0.1 came out quite quickly to fix just that. I cannot confirm on CS, but CS2 targa works fine as in the attached (from a pshop7 original psd).

It used to be that SL would get funny on 32bit targas with more than one alpha channel in the PSD; I don't know if that is still the case. If you do have multiple alphas, try flattening and deleting all channels but the "right" alpha prior to TGA writing.

Well I tried to flatten it down to 1 layer with the alpha prior to writing this, and it still flattened it again and added a white background before saving.

I suppose i'd have to try and find this patch for this to work.

It's a bummer too since I really can't make anything new clothing and some textures wise because of this.

I don't have CS (still using 7.1) but if it's not creating the alpha automatically you can create it manually easily enough. Make sure you work on layers above the background layer. When you're ready to save, turn off the background layer so that you're seeing the checkerboard. Select one of your other layers and do a "merge visible" to merge all the non-background layers. Go to the selection menu and do a "load selection" and pick "layer [your newly merged laer] transparency." Then do a "save slection" and save it as a new channel. Go to the channel palette and make sure you have a channel called "alpha" which should have just been created when you saved the selection. Now save as 32bit TGA. If you already had some saved selections, then either delete them from the channels palette first, or make sure you choose "alpha" from the list when you do your "save selection." It's a bit of a pain in the ass but that should work.

You can check out my tutorial at the link below.


http://www.sluniverse.com/kb/article.aspx?id=10199


I never flatten images in PS CS...

Speaking of CS (sorry for veering OT), anyone else notice there is already a CS2?
http://www.adobe.com/products/photoshop/main.html

Is that some kind of record?

A record for greed.


I saw the new features, they are nice, but I can't see upgrading at this point.

That's how I felt about CS 1

There's a CS2 ALREADY!? Wow.

And Thanks chip, i'll give it a try when I have a chance next and let you know if it works.

My experience with CS is that saving as a .tga will always flatten. The alpha is still an easy fix. You only need to make a selection of what you want to remain visable, then go to the channels pallet. At the bottom of that panel is a button for saving your selection as a channel. Click that and your selection is automatically entered as an alpha 1 channel (selection is the white area). Save your .psd as a .tga and save as 32 bit as this will preserve your new alpha channel in the flattened image and your selection will be surrounded by transparancy as you intended it to be. IM me in game if you need help.

I just want to mention this because I like to have an archive psd with the layers preserved. You may care to make a copy of the original psd and merge the layers on the copy & proceed to make the alpha from that one.

Excellent tip Mirra. Always save a copy of the fully layered psd before merging layers.

One of the most important PS tip EVAR! You wouldn't believe the anguish the first time I forgot to do this...

OMG!!! i was *SO* gonna post this question in the forum! but i guess art beat me to it which is great cept i have to do the channels thing?!

that is sooooooooooo annoying.

ps7 made TGA transparancy so easy i cant believe if i upgrade its more work. that is soooooooooooooooo MS of them.

*kicks adobe*

I have the same problem and it has been driving me insane. I use CS and could not get the alpha channels to work right. Thanks for the tips!

spi

I too had this problem when I first got CS. Simple to fix though...
Look around adobes website for the old 7.0 tga plugin. The old plugin saved the transparency information to the alpha channel.
I'm not 100% sure if this is the tga plugin you may need but I think it might...
http://www.adobe.com/support/downloads/detail.jsp?ftpID=1544

/me gives Div the little gold star

I use CS and CS2. I dont understand these transparency issues. Creating a Transparency in CS seems pertty straight forward.