Photoshop Elements

Does N E One No How To Get The Alpha Channels In Photoshop Elements? All The Tuturials I Look At Are For Photoshop Pro And Such. And It Seems To Be Different In Photoshop Elements Cuz I Cant Get It To Work. Anyone No?

Proper .tga files that can be used in SL is not supported by Elements. I have PSE2 and any .tga I save looks like it has alpha channel but when viewed in SL the alpha shows white. Elements is just that, its not PS with full functionality

Yeah Thats The Same Problem Im Having

Forgive me if this is a bit blunt (no pun intended), but you're attempting to perform brain surgery with a butter knife. Trying to use Phtoshop Elements to do things for which you should be using Photoshop is like trying to use Notepad to do things for which you should be using Word. The tool your using is simply not suited for the task you're trying to accomplish. PS and PSE completely different tools, and they are by no means capable of producing the same results (at least not in any practical sense).

If you're using PSE becuase it's marketed as an inexpensive Photoshop, you got suckered. If you're using it because it came with your camera or with your scanner and you don't have anything else to use, then either spend the money to get the real Photoshop, or else download GIMP for free (and if you do the latter, make sure to get GIMPshop so it behaves like Photoshop).

And if you don't like The GIMP (even Shopperized) there's also PaintShop Pro. I would not personally recommend investing in PhotoShop unless you had other reasons to use it (e.g. graphic/Web design or creating digital art) -- and even then PSP may have all the tools you need.

I use my PSE for editing my digital photograhy. It works fine for that.

A friend in world, Beryl Greenacre, pointed out to me the other day that I can try a free 60 day demo of the full version of Paint Shop Pro 9. Seems like a good deal and I will probably try it out and see what I can do with it, but I am afraid I will get hooked on it and have to buy it after the demo expires.

Free Paint Shop Pro Trial

Try useing elements with its better set of tools to create your masterpeice. Then save as a PSD file. Then use Gimp to convert to a TGA file for upload to SL. It works great for me

I've been able to produce alpha textures from Photoshop Elements with the help of a free conversion tool called Image Magick. I've posted a tutorial on how to use Image Magick with Photoshop Elements elswhere on the forums. It involves a few more steps than using Photoshop's alpha channels, but it works great.

I'd have to disagree with Photoshop Elements being completely unsuited to producing work for Second Life. Yes, it has a far more limited tool set than the full version of Photoshop, but it's still possible, with some amount of extra effort, to produce some stunning work in PSE.

Mind you, if I could afford it as a toy (I don't work with image editing professionally, so such a purchase is entirely a "toy" for me), I'd buy the full version of PS in a heartbeat. But PSE does reasonably well in a pinch, despite its shortcomings. It's more like performing brain surgery with a dull X-acto knife: not as precise as a scalpel, but still possible if you're careful.

I knew someone was going to respond this way. I tried to head it off by adding the line "not in any proactical sense" to soften my comments a bit, but I guess it didn't work. Let me clarify.

Yes, you can use PSE to make great images, and yes, you can use Notepad to write a great novel, and yes, you could even use a butter knife to perform brain surgery if you really really wanted to, assuming you possess the required degree of patience and skill to compensate for the limitations of the tool. That does not mean however that it's practical or wise to do so when much better tools are available.

With GIMP (and more recently GIMPshop) freely available, there's no reason for anyone not to use a fully functional image editor. It just doesn't make sense for anyone to use limited programs like PSE and then have to spend their time trying to find or create work arounds for said limitations when they could easily obtain a program that does not have those limitations.

I'm personally a Photoshop guy so I never use GIMP myself, but as you can tell I highly applaud GIMP's and GIMPshop's developers for creating high quality tools that everyone can get their hands on. So, as I said, if you can afford Photoshop then get it it; it's worth every penny. If you can't, then get GIMPshop. Either way, there's no reason to keep using something that won't very easily do the job you want it to do, and certainly there's no excuse not to get something that will.

I tried using the GIMP at one point, but the user interface is even worse than Photoshop's. I'm not all that fond of Photoshop's UI, but I'm used to it by now. Yes, the GIMP is fabulously well-featured and powerful, but features I can't find don't do me any good.

I'd never heard of GIMPshop, but my browser is merrily chugging away at the download right now. I'm hoping the Windows version runs as well as the effusive blog commentary says the Mac version runs. If the interface doesn't blow chunks like the original GIMP, then you might have made a new GIMP convert, Chosen.

Oh cool. I've got the installer going now, and it looks like they've already fixed my single biggest complaint with the GIMP: it's completely wacko multiple-window interface. I habitually Alt+Tab between applications in Windows while I'm editing images, and the GIMP's behavior was to treat each little mini-window (the editing surface, the toolbox, the menu bar, the layers window) as its own Alt+Tab target, which was excruciating to use. I'm looking forward to trying out GIMPShop.

I tried Gimpshop on a XP sp2 machine and I get an odd "no disk" error that I can click through and still use. Gimpshop is early in beta so I would keep that in mind when DLing it. I like what I see so far but I don't trust it with anything other than a quick adjustment of a pic or something so I don't end up wasting effort since it seems rather unstable in my installation. Otherwise it is a great idea.

Well, now that I've spent the past couple days playing with GIMPshop, I can draw some preliminary conclusions. GIMPshop is a step in the right direction, interface-wise, but it's downright eccentric in its internal window-handling. Give it a couple more versions, and it might be worth using on XP. I'm finding it useful, but I'm making paranoia saves to disk far more often than I would with Photoshop Elements.

I haven't run across the "no disk" error that Kathmandu had, but I get all kinds of other weird behavior. Definitely not ready for production work, but the concept is good.