Umm can someone help with some Photoshop basics?

I'm new to SL and trying to learn to make things... I have Photoshop CS but can't find options to save TGAs as either 24 or 32 bit.. only 8 and 16... do I need something else or am I doing something wrong? And I can't upload a JPEG without crashing... not sure if this is a bug or I'm making a mistake... the files are a comparable size to textures I've bought in-world... I've used Illustrator a lot but I've only ever used Photoshop for very basic functions... any help would be appreciated

Hi Fade, and welcome! (I see this is only your second post. )

I think that you are confusing two different things in Photoshop CS. Bits per channel, and bits per pixel.

When you are working in a file, under the Image Mode menu, you find two choices; 8 bit and 16 bit per channel.

That's referring to the information available to each channel of the image, or how many colors the image can display. (1 bit is either black or white, 8 bits is 256 possible colors or shades of gray, 16 bits is "millions" of colors, and 32 bit is High Dynamic Range or HDRI.)

You won't see the choice to save with 32 bits per pixel, which allows enough information to save an Alpha channel, until you are saving a Targa image. It's in a dialog that pops up after you click "Save."

So work as you normally would, and when you save, choose the Targa format, and then enable 32 bit from the next dialog.

As far as crashing when uploading .jpg files.. Do you mean that Second Life crashes when you upload files you've made in Photoshop, or that Photoshop crashes when you try to open a .jpg file in it?

Thanks for that.. that helped

Yes, i mean i keep crashing when I try and upload a JPEG already made into Second Life...

Uploading jpegs used to crash SL for me too. This was like maybe back in 1.2 or so. It stopped all of a sudden, so I suppose I got lucky. I know other people who still have issues with it. There doesn't seem to be any ryhme or reason to it. It just strikes some people all the time, some people some of the time, and some people never. I haven't been able to determine any correlation between machine specs and this problem.

The simple answer is just don't use jpeg. Consider the crashing to be your computer's way of telling you jpeg sucks. It's quite simply the worst possible image format you could use, even if it didn't crash you. It's only practical use is for web pages. Jpeg quality is way too poor for any other purpose. It's a terrible, terrible format.

Like I always say, use TGA, everyday, all the way, TGA!

Thankyou to both of you... I magaged to sort out the TGAs...

You will actually keep two copies of all your image files. One is in Photoshop's *. PSD format to keep information about all the layers in your images. This is of course you are using Photoshop. And then a another copy of the image in *.TGA for uploading into SL.

What Chosen and Noel said.

I just wanted to make sure that you weren't crashing Photoshop, because sometimes the I/O plugins can become corrupted, and you need to install fresh ones. But, as Chosen said, there's no reason at all to be uploading .jpgs into Second Life.

It's a nasty, lossy format that always leaves artifacts, and it's not even any smaller than the .tga files once they are all stored on the SL servers. So it's pointless to even try it.

What Chosen, Noel and Robin said

I actually have a theory (completely unverified) that uploaded JPGs can often be larger than uploaded TGAs!
The JPG2000 compressor doesn't know that the old-JPG artefacts are artefacts, and may actually have to insert more bytes into the final JPG2000 file to encode them accurately!

Just one more reason to always upload TGAs.

Thanks to all who posted replies.. as a result I was able to upload images of my drawings successfuly and made my first sale!... and yes I've left the JPEgs alone...