Where the #@%! is the TGA.....

Am I an idiot or do I need something else to save as TGA. I got CS2 yesterday and I can't find TGA anywhere, just the usual jpg, bmp, gif & sw. I already cut out the images, made the backgrounds 0% opacity and now I want to save them. What gives?

http://www.never30.com/evolve/downloads.asp
http://forums.secondlife.com/showthread.php?t=48537

Try that

First thing I always do with a project is simply save it, which defaults to a PSD file. Then I do a Save As. Targa is the second to last option of the Formats, between Scitex and TIFF. Then I open up the TGA version I just made and go to Image Size and make it smaller. I'm a noob with PhotoShop so I don't know why it saves it as a huge image at low resolution. I usually resize it to about 3 inches square with 150-something dpi to end up with a 512 pixel x512 pixel image. I resave it and then upload that file.

Something I never realized until after many L$10 fees: Before you upload the file, you can preview it on an AV form. When you pick the file to upload, a box shows up and it defaults to a thumbnail of your art. But you can change that "Preview" to many different views, like AV top, bottom, etc. Then you can see if your art is placed correctly for the AV, if your alpha channel worked and more, before spending the money.

there's definitely a problem then because my "save as" doesn't have a TGA or a TIFF.

I have CS2 as well and for some reason there is no tga for certain images. I started farting around to see why. It seems that if there is no transparency around the outside it doesn't let me have the TGA option. If I made something where there is transparency somewhere around the outside borders it gives me the options. I have no idea why but I have kept gimp on my computer for when I made images with no alpha channel in it so i can convert it from PNG to TGA via Gimp

So I have made lots of TGA stuff with CS2 but if there is no alpha channel needed cause well its all filled in it wont let me make a TGA it will only give me the option if there is obvious transparency and an alpha channel is needed. I also tried making an alpha channel even if none is needed to see if the TGA option would come up and it wont. Instead of downloading a third party plug in which appears to have a bunch of controversy attached to it about whether or not it ruins the products I simply save the thing as a PNG if there is no transparency in the thing and convert it to TGA in Gimp it makes no sense but yes it leaves out TGA in some cases ?

In other cases i get like 20 options to save from ?

I tried all kinds of permutations to get it to show up rasterize, dont rasterize, well just about everything I could think of with my limited knowledge TGA does not appear in many cases and it seems to be linked with the presence of a transparent layer (i repeat the word layer hehe) which of course will have an alpha channel if these dont exist you aren't allowed to save it as a TGA /shrug ..

Get GIMP and save your files to any popular format you want then open it with GIMP and resave it to TGA. I haven't found any graphic file GIMP can't open and it lets you save to any file format you want.......all formats are available.

Thanks for this information! I've spent a lot of Linden to also realize that the design did not work on the AV! Now I know better.

Wilhelm, make sure the Image Mode of the .psd file you're working on is set to RGB. It sounds like you're using CMYK -- which won't let you save as TGA.

Okay, lots of things to clear up in this thread. Here we go:



Oh, for the love of God, don't try that!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

ShastaBert, whatever your do, do NOT corrupt your brand new Photoshop with that awful, FUBAR'ed TGA utility just mentioned. Trust me, you don't want to go there. It's the worst thing you could possibly do. In case you missed the half a million other threads where I explained why, here it is again:

1. The files it creates are incompatible with 99% of graphics applications, as opposed to normal TGA's, which have been a staple of the graphics inudustry for decades, and can be understood by nearly all graphics programs.
   
   
   
2. It causes artifacts in your outputted image, which are impossible to correct. The most common of these is a white halo around the opaque parts of your image. Less common, but still quite prevalent, is the appearance of extruded lines all across the image when it's opened by a program that doesn't understand this very strange, completely non-standard file format. (By "opened", I mean viewed in any way, which can even include something as simple as thumbnail generation.) Once that has happened, the file is forever corrupted, and those lines won't go away, no matter what you do.
   
   
   
3. People who insist on suggesting that thing are mistakenly convinced it's a time saver, as it automates the process of creating alpha channels. In truth, it is not a significant time saver at all since making an alpha channel, even a very complex one, literally only takes a few seconds at most.
   
   
   
4. For images with complicated transparency levels, like stained glass windows, for example, that so called "time saver" actually makes the process take MUCH longer.
   
   
   
5. It encourages destructive work-flow habits. Since it’s entirely a WYSIWYG system, those who use it have a tendency to create transparency by erasing, which makes it very difficult to make changes later.

Again, I repeat, do not touch this automation tool with a 10 foot pole. If you downloaded and installed that junk, uninstall Photoshop immediately, make sure every trace of it is gone, restart your machine, and re-install a fresh copy of Photoshop. Use the regular TGA saver utility that came with Photoshop CS2, and you'll do just fine.



Rocky, so you know, dpi has no relevance whatsoever for screen images. It's only important for print images. On the screen, the dpi, or more properly ppi, will ALWAYS be whatever your monitor's ppi is. The standards for that are 72 or 96. 72 is the most common.

If you're on a laptop, then it's possible you may have a non-standard resolution, especially if it's a newer widescreen model. Notebook screens have been getting pretty weird lately with their pixel counts. If you're on a desktop, you can bet your first born that your looking at 72ppi or 96ppi right now as you read this.

What you want to be concerned about is not size measured in inches, but size measured in pixels. All that matters for sizing screen images is how many pixels across it is, and how many pixels tall it is. Throw any other measurement concerns out the window. You don't need them.

When you create a new file in Photoshop, take a look at the dialog window. Next to the right of the Width and Height fields, you'll see a couple of pull-down menus. These are for choosing your measurement units. It sounds like you've got yours set to inches. Set both of them to pixels, and leave them that way.

The resolution field doesn't matter, but you might want to set it to 72 just to remind yourself that that's the standard for screen images.

It sounds like the reason your TGA's were coming out so huge is because your souce images were also huge, but you didn't realize it because you were working at a magnification of well less than 100%. When you open your outputted TGA, the new file will display at 100% magnification by default, making it appear much larger than your source image, even though, pixel for pixel, it's really the same size.

If you want your image to be 512x512 pixels, make sure you create it at 512x512 pixels to begin with, and you'll have no worries.



As Raindrop has already stated, make sure you're working in RGB mode. Also make sure working at 8 bits per channel. TGA only supports RGB color space, not any of the others, so if you're in any other mode, TGA will not be available as a save option.

You'll find the mode options on the Image menu.

Also, take a look in your Adobe Photoshop CS2\Plug-Ins\File Formats. Do you see a file called Targa.8BI there? If so, your Photoshop is equipped to save TGA files, provided you're working in the right mode for them. If not, I'd suggest you uninstall and re-install Photoshop. Alternatively, you maybe able just to locate that file on the install CD, and copy it over manually, but chances are if that's missing, other important things may be missing too. A botched install is best handled by a complete re-install.

As for why TIFF is missing, that's a little more strange. There are very few color space modes that TIFF won't support, so TIFF should appear as a save option almost always. If you were working in Multichannel mode, you wouldn't see TIFF, but you also wouldn't see much else (jus PSD, PSB, EPS, and RAW), and you wouldn't be able to use a lot of other tools, so you'd probably have noticed something was wrong even before you tried to save. If TIFF is missing as a save choice, I'd further suspect that your Photoshop install was incomplete. Try uninstalling and re-installing. I'm not sure what else to tell you.



ShastaBert, read the transparency guide, stickied at the top of this forum. Cutting things out and changing background layer opacity is not the way to create transparency for TGA files. You need to use alpha channels. The guide contains all the information you need, including step-by-step tutorials, but if anything's unclear for you, feel free to ask any questions you have after reading it.


No offense, Peggy, but I'll never understand why some GIMP users insist on telling people to get GIMP after they've already bought Photoshop. Trust me, there's absolutely nothing GIMP can do that Photoshop can't, but there are a great many things Photoshop can do that GIMP can't. I'm not saying GIMP isn't powerful; it is quite powerful. However, it's no Photoshop. If someone has Photoshop, they have absolutely no need of GIMP whatsoever. (Also GIMP has arguably the worst user interface of all time, while Photoshop's interface has over the years become the standard by which most other interfaces are judged, but I digress.)

ShastaBert may have a bad install on his hands here, but that sort of thing is very rare with well packaged software like Photoshop. The chances of something going wrong with GIMP's much more complicated installation procedure are far greater. I'm sure you'd agree that for someone trying to fix problems, it makes a lot more sense to start just by hitting the one or two buttons necessary to re-install the packaged product than to go through all the many steps for installing an unpackaged one like GIMP.

When stuff like this comes up, often the impression given is that open source fanboys are trying to make Photoshop users feel bad for having spent money. I don't mean you in particular, Peggy, since your vibe here does seem to be one of helpfulness, not ridicule, but before some of the voices of "hey, you're either an idiot or an evil person for supporting the pay-software regime" chime in, I figured I'd say something.

I guess I should have said my suggestion was a relatively simple, no cost "work around" for the OP's problem of saving to TGA. I certainly would not suggest anyone who forked out nearly $600 USD for Photoshop to ditch that program and use GIMP. You're contention that GIMP cannot do everything Photoshop can but Photoshop can do everything GIMP may be true..............I've never used Photoshop so I cannot say either way. The interface for GIMP is not nearly as bad as you make it out to be.........not all that intuitive I would say is true. But that comes from hundreds (maybe thousands) of contributers to the program since it's open source.........pretty geeky to us less than experts in graphic creations. The documentation that comes with the program is hard to read and really not in any intuitively logical order. But it's free and it does have the capabilities to do most anything in the graphics field of creation. But I'm not sure the documentation of Photoshop it too much better...............if it was why so many questions asked in this forum? Why do people who have the program and the manual still not understand how to do something as simple as save a file to a specific format? Maybe the interface for Photoshop is not as intuitive as many seem to think it is.

I understand you are a graphics arts professional in RL and probably have years of experience with Photoshop. The interface is something you are very familar with and know all the ins and out of the program........something extremely complicated for me is a snap for you. I can not afford the cost of Photoshop to play with textures for SL so I'll probably never know how "good" Photoshop is..........or how bad either. I can affford GIMP and I'm learning how to use it..........maybe in 10 years I can match your skills in Photoshop with my free GIMP. Then I'll know if everything you said is true.

My suggestion was a "work around". Not a lure to come to the "dark side".

No offense taken...........I just wanted to clear that up.

Chosen Few speaks the truth. Keep repeating RGB for TGA, RGB for TGA. Photoshop is your friend. An overly complicated friend who wont let you forget what a pain in the ass he is, a friend with a seemingly unlimited amount of options and subtle nuances, but a friend the texture enthusiast just cant live without. Cursing those alpha channel halo demons? There are ways around all such troubles, the answer is simply knowledge, grasshopper. I bow down to the Adobe gods and am enlightend.

Heh- I use BOTH Photoshop & GIMP!

GIMP works well on laptops. Doesnt need lots of memory, etc.