Clothing brushes for paint shop pro

The problem to be solved is a white halo that appears when the transparent region created in your alpha channel overlaps an area in your design where there are no pixels on any layer. There are several ways to beat the problem:

1. Don't leave any regions in your drawing layers where there are no pixels. That is, if you were to merge all visible layers, there shouldn't be any places where you see a checkerboard pattern. This is my own preferred method. If I am making a dress, I fill one entire layer with the fabric -- I never cut pieces out -- and let the image in my alpha channel do all the trimming. That way, I know that there are NO places where the dreaded white halo can be created.

2. Create an extra layer at the bottom of your stack and fill it completely with a dark color (black or 50% gray, as Atom suggests, will work). That guarantees that there are no "checkerboard" regions where a halo can appear. This is a nice, simple method that a lot of people like. It has the disadvantage that it might leave a small DARK halo in places where light-colored parts of your design don't line up perfectly with edges of the alpha channel image.

3. Make the opaque regions in your alpha channel image slightly smaller than the areas you have drawn in your layers (or make the drawn areas slightly bigger than the non-transparent regions in the alpha channel). From a technical perspective, this is hard to do, but again it guarantees that there will always be pixels under the edge of any transparent regions in the alpha channel image. It also beats the "dark halo" problem because pixels at the edge of anything "cut out" by the alpha channel are automatically the right color.

4. "Bleed" some pixels from things you have drawn into the "checkerboard" regions next to them. This is a simple way to accomplish strategy #3. You can do it either by carefully using your smudge tool to smear pixels at the edge of your drawn regions into the empty, checkerboard space, or you can use a routine like the Flaming Pear plug-in that does it for you with a couple of mouse clicks.

5. Don't use an alpha channel at all. Create your work and save it as a PNG file with simple transparency. (Yes, you can also create a PNG file with an alpha channel. That's a different story.) This method is truly attractive to many people who don't want to mess with an alpha channel. The big limitation is that once you start making complicated designs, it's hard to keep track of what's transparent and to modify it easily. An alpha channel encapsulates all the transparency information in one place that's easy to see and easy to modify.

How you choose to avoid or remove the white halo is a personal matter, influenced in part by the kind of design work you do. Once you understand why the halo is there, you can devise work methods that fit your own style --- and then join in arguments on this forum about which method is "best."

Maybe the best place to start is with the sticky on alpha channels and transparency, at the top of this forum. Then, take some time to work through Robin Wood's excellent tutorial at http://www.robinwood.com/Catalog/Technical/SL-Tuts/SLTutSet.html. Once you've understood what's there, I think your problem will disappear.

Good luck.