Help please...

If you install the PS 7.0 TGA saver utility, you will FUBAR your Photoshop. Stay away from it at all cost.

That utility was only in existence officially for a few short months, and it was by far the biggest blunder in Adobe's history. Adobe realized their mistake almost instantly, and corrected the problem with the free 7.0.1 upgrade, but unfortunately the damage still lingers, as is evidenced every time someone posts it somewhere on the net, under the erroneous promise that it will make life easier. Files created with that utility suffer the following problems:

1. They will have visual artifacts in them which will be impossible to correct, the most common of which is a white halo surrounding the opaque parts of the image.

2. The files will be incompatible with most graphics applications. Instead of real alpha channels, which have been a staple of the graphics industry for decades, and so can be understood by nearly all graphics programs, those 7.0-style files contain a proprietary element called an "embedded alpha", which almost no program on Earth can read. It's only by an utter miracle of conicidental timing that SL can read those files at all. The relevant part of SL happened to have been under development at during that short 3-month period when PS 7.0 was current.

3. People who use the embedded alpha work flow do so primarily because they mistakenly think it's a time saver. In truth, it is not a significant time saver at all since making an alpha channel only takes a few seconds at most. Learning to use alpha channels might not be intuitive for most people at first, but really, once you learn how to do it, it's incredibly quick and easy. It's not rocket science.

4. For images with complicated transparency levels, like stained glass windows, for example, the embedded alpha work flow actually makes the process take MUCH longer than it takes to make a real alpha channel.

5. Very importantly, embedded alpha work flow encourages destructive habits. By disallowing you the ability to create and edit alpha channels properly, it ends up costing you an enormous amount of control and flexibility. There are countless situations in which working directly on the alpha channel itself allows you to do things you could never otherwise do in any reasonable amount of time, if at all.

6. Once installed, that 7.0 plugin effectively destroys your ability to every again work properly with real alpha channels should you ever choose to do so. Even if you remove it, PS won't behave entirely properly afterwards. The only recourse is to completely uninstall PS and then reinstall it all over again. What a pain.

7. Files containing embedded alphas are prone to sudden, irreversible data corruption. I have no idea why, but they often end up with colored lines spontaneously appearing across any white space in the image. Once that happens, the file is toast. You can manually erase the lines, but as soon as you close the file and reopen it, they come back.


So, once again, DO NOT INSTALL THAT FILE!!! It is nothing but trouble.

Now, can we please, please, please, please never speak of it again?


If you're really deadset against using alpha channels, then instead of borking your Photoshop with that horrendously dangerous plugin, just use the PNG format instead of TGA. PNG supports both alpha transparency and simple transparency. With PNG's simple transparency, you work entirely with WYSIWYG, and you never have to worry about any of the problems associated with embedded alphas.

Thanks for the posts. I now remember why I do not use the forums for SL. Everyone is always so nice and help full.

HAD I remembered more info btw I would have posted it. Again, Sorry not perfect, consider this thread closed.