black becomes blue when uploaded?

Hi, I'm trying to make some clothes and other textures and i've noticed that some of the time, black areas become blue when i upload them to SL. Any idea what this is and how i can fix it?

Are you working in RGB mode inside Photoshop, or in CMYK? By the sound of the symptom, I'd guess you're in CMYK and saving out as JPEG before uploading to SL. SL then has to convert the image to RGB to display it onscreen. Blacks and blues often get interchanged in CMYK to RGB conversion. Try printing an RGB image with a lot of black to blue or black to purple gradients, for example, and you'll see what I mean. Everything that was supposed to be blue will likely come out black and/or vise versa.

RGB is for the screen. CMYK is for print. They operate on completely different mathmatics and really should never be mixed. When you're doing screen images, which is what all SL images are, make sure you're always in RGB mode.

One way to do that, by the way, is to always save to TGA. TGA has many advantages over other formats for 3D texturing purposes, but the most relevant one for this discussion is that does not support any color mode other than RGB. When you go to save your file, if TGA is not one of the format choices, then you were working in the wrong mode.

Another possibility, is you could have local lighting turned on in SL, and you're standing next to a blue light source. My money's on the CMYK thing though.

i'm in RGB actually... was just checking that when i saw your post. i'm just using the "upper body" template from secondlife.com

thanks for the suggestion but unfortunately that's not it.

as for lighting, the blue doesn't just show up when i ahve it on. it shows up in the texture pane and the upload pane as well, so it's a problem w/ the file or the coloring and not the way it displays in world.

hmm, but i just noticed taht a jpg doens't create this problem... it's just another of the problems i'm having w/ bmps, which i think has to do w/ the way photoshop for mac handles bmps.

That seems odd, but it wouldn't suprise me. BMP is primarily a Windows format. No telling how the Mac SL client might be reading it before upload.

Use TGA. It's much more universal. It's really the only format you should use for texturing. That's true not just for SL, but for all 3D apps. TGA has been the format of choice for texturing for many, many years now, and it also happens to be the only format SL will import that supports transparency, which is necessary for clothing. Like I always say, TGA, all the way, every day, TGA.