Photoplus and Flaming Pear

Does anyone use PhotoPlus if you do have you managed to get the flaming pear to work. I cannot seem to get it work and for some reason I do not get the alpha channel appear on the channel tab.

Any help appreciated

Flaming Pear is a company, not a product. I assume you're probably referring to their Solidify filter, since it's mentioned in a lot of Photoshop tutorials on this forum. But the company makes dozens of products, so if you meant something else, please specify.

As for PhotoPlus, I've been trying to read up on it, but there doesn't seem to be a complete feature list anywhere on the Web. The video on Serif's website does mention "support for Adobe Photoshop plugins", but it doesn't elaborate.

I did manage to find a PDF user guide for the X2 version, which I'm hoping isn't too different from the current X3 version. Apparently, if you want the guide for the current version, it'll cost you $14.95, which is more than a little ridiculous, in my opinion.

It's not a hugely informative document, almost more of a quick overview of a handful of features than an actual manual, but here's the relevant excerpt for installing and using third party plug-ins:



I have no idea what Serif might define as the difference between an "automated" and "non-automated" plug-in. I would guess Solidify would be considered "non-automated", since it doesn't do anything complicated, but who knows. All you can do is put it in your PhotoPlus Plug-ins folder, and see if it works. If it does, great. If not, well, don't take this the wrong way, but that's what you get for buying uncommonly used software.

Is PhotoPlus even capable of creating a TGA file, by the way? The manual doesn't seem to offer a complete listing of supported file formats. It only lists GIF, JPEG, PNG, PSD, and its own native SPP. I have a hard time believing that ANY raster editor in this day and age would be THAT limited.

Yes it does support tga as I have been using it for textures for sl quite some time. and the plug in works as its installed, and can be applied to a texture, but what I cannot seem to be is create the aplha channel.

Mine is Photoplus 10 I have a adobe pdf file on desktop.

and you can save files as spp or tga, png or whatever format you want.

Basically the same, only difference some actions are worded differently, but a lot of the commands are the same.

So you weren't actually asking about the filter at all then? I hate to sound snippy, but really, I wish you would have said that in the first place. It would have saved me a half hour of researching the wrong thing. If you wanted to know how to create an alpha channel in the program, why didn't you just say that?

In most graphics programs I've ever used that are capable of creating and manipulating channels, either (or both) of two methods are employed:

1. If the program has a fully functional channels palette, use it to create a new channel, and then paint whatever you want onto that channel.

2. If the program does not have a fully functional channels palette, or has no channels palette at all, then the methodology is usually to create a mask first, and save the mask to alpha afterward.

I managed to find the user guide for PhotoPlus 10, by changing the URL to http://www.serif.com/community/pdfs/photoplus10.pdf

From what little it explains, it seems PhotoPlus does have a channels palette, and that the program does allow you to paint on and apply effects to individual channels. However, there is a particular phrase that suggests the behavior of the palette is quite odd: "channels are always a colour sub-set of the active selected layer". This display of channels on a per-layer basis, rather than a whole-image basis would seem to suggest the authors of PhotPlus do not intend for you to use channels in the way most other programs would have you do it. Therefore, chances are the channels palette won't be of any help to you in creating alpha channels.

Whether the save-mask-to-channel method might be an option, I don't know. The guide only mentions the word "alpha" four times, and not one of those is in any kind of how-to context. They're mainly just wildly ambiguous, if not wholly incorrect, references to what alpha channels are used for in certain image formats. There's no explanation whatsoever of how to create new ones, or even manipulate existing ones.

I suspect this is probably beyond the program's capabilities. If I'm right about that, then you're going to be limited to WYSIWYG transparency, via PNG. That's better than no transparency at all, of course, but it is pretty confining.

Without having a working copy of the program to play with (and I'm not about to buy one, of course), there's not much more I can tell you. Hopefully someone will come a long who's got more experience with it. I wouldn't hold your breath, though. It's not a very popular title. All I can say from here is good luck.

Thank you chosen for your explanation, and I'm sorry if I sounded misleading. I was actually enquiring if anyone uses the photoplus and if they did, how they did apply the solidify filter, as I said and as you seem to explain, the programme does not seem possible to create a alpha channel.

I have tried create the channel but hey ho I've come unstuck.