PS 7 to CS3

Can someone please help me as to how to save a alph in CS3. PS 7 is so easy, I have tried everything even tried help and it says you cant have transparent in your background.
I am going crazy.

Read the transparency guide, stickied at the top of the forum. It's all in there.

So you know, PS 7.0 was Adobe's one and only experiment with automated alpha channel generation for TGA. The experiment was a dismal failure, abandoned by Adobe within 3 months of its release. Throughout the entire history of computer graphics, both before and since PS 7.0, alpha channels have been created the same way. It was only within that 3-month period when 7.0 was current that anything was different.

The biggest problem with 7.0 TGA's is that they're unreadable by most programs. It's only by an utter miracle of timing that SL can read those files at all. The relevant parts of both programs just so happened to have been under development at the exact same time.

Also, those files are extremely prone to sudden, irreversible data corruption. If you've never had one of them go bad on you, count yourself lucky.

The images also tend to contain artifacts, which are impossible to get rid of. The most common of these artifacts is haloing.


Anyway, making alpha channels is not hard. It only takes a few seconds at most. The guide contains several tutorials for how to do it, all of which look a lot more complicated than they actually are. Don't let the fact that it takes a lot of words to describe the process fool you. It's much simpler to do than to explain.

If you're deadset against learning the alpha methodology, you could always use PNG format instead of TGA. That will allow you to work exactly the way you're used to, WYSIWYG, and without all the issues of incompatibility, artifacting, and likely data corruption. I still recommend you learn to use alpha channels properly, since it's such an important staple of nearly all things graphical, but if you prefer not to, PNG is your option.

Chosen's right. There are several ways to save an alpha channel, all described in the sticky. Probably the easiest way in CS3 is to create a layer with your mask in it, select all pixels in the layer, open the Channel palette, and click on the little icon that looks like a gray rectangle with a light circle in it. Voila! Instant alpha channel.