Texture Tint

Can anyone help me?

I haven't done clothes in here in a long time and now that I started I noticed a change in the textures I bring in SL because of the tint. The tint is totally ruining the colour of the texture that I am using, I was wondering if there was anyway I can get rid of the tint part in the appearance area. It is making all of my clothes turn a lighter colour and when I turn the tint darker it will just destroy the texture even more. How can I get rid of the tint part in my appearance setting?

Delightra

Can you post a screenshot of what you mean?

There's no way for the tint color to lighten an image. It's a multiplier. If the tint is white, you're multiplying by one, so the color values come out exactly the same. It's only by applying something other than white that any alterations can be made. And the alterations will always be darker, never lighter. There's no tint value greater than one, so there's no way to lighten anything.

Are you talking about the sun here, I think you maybe. Try setting your client to high noon when you build, anything else will give you a tint. That is just a general reddish/orange cast on everything. That may be what you are talking about.

It's also possible that the OP is talking about the difference in colour between the texture mesh on an avatar and the same RGB colour on a prim.

http://seshat-czeret.blogspot.com/2008/06/tinting-prim-skirts-grey.html contains what I know about that, and also a link to Natalia's info on it.

thanks so much Chosen Few, Atom Burma and Seshat Czeret for trying to help me, but I guess I didn't explain it properly. Here are some links that I made that should explain what I am talking about a little better.

The first one is from the SL Previewer and the file is a tga file which is on the left hand side of the picture. This is how I want the outfit to look when it comes into world. The lions are clear and bright and the jacket is a dark colour. One the right hand side is what I brought into world. This is a png file and when I first bring it in, the tint settings are set at what the picture looks like. The more I try to change the tint the darker everything looks and it just looks more horrible.

http://delightra.com/TgaVersesPNG.jpg


This link shows where the tint area is, which is in the appearance. When you bring a texture into world it has to be ajusted by your appearance. As you can see the tint totally made the outfit way way lighter then I want it to work. I want it to look like the tga file.

I heard that you can bring in png files now instead us using tga files. I don't know what happened but I cannot bring in a tga file anymore, everything that should be transparent is now white.

Now can anyone help me figure out what I am doing wrong? heheh

Thanks so much, I really do appreciate any help I can get.

Delightra

sorry, the tint url picture is here

http://delightra.com/AfterTint.jpg

What I want is for not to be able to use the tint in this program at all.


Thanks

You aren't tinting it; the lightness you see is due to sunlight. Wear your outfit then change the time of day, change the settings in WindLight, change presets - you'll see the outfit change (just like in real life).

(As stated above tinting can only make something darker anyway. Imagine having a light blue T shirt and then dropping it in various dyes.)

Hey Osprey Therian

Thanks for posting a reply to this message. But, no matter what light I am using in SL, I am still not getting the exact texture that I am bringing into world. SL is automatically changing my texture to a lighter one. The lions you see on that picture are lighter when when I brought it in world just because of the tint that appearance automatically gives you. I don't need the tint in SL and I wish if I could just turn it off.

Delightra

Hmmm.... The tint that Appearance automatically gives you, the default color on a piece of new clothing, is pure white. That is, no color at all. Your only choice in Appearance is to ADD color. It looks to me as if the problem is not with anything that happens in Appearance, but with your texture itself. Take a look at the alpha channel when you have your texture file open in Photoshop. The opaque parts of your pattern should be totally white <255,255,255> in the alpha channel. If they are the slightest bit gray, then you will have partial transparency in the image that is uploaded to SL. It wouldn't necessarily be enough for you to recognize it as transparency, but it would be enough so that the base tint of your avatar skin would start to show through and make the clothing look a bit muddy.

hey Rolig Loon

I know about the alpha thingy, but I didn't bring this texture in as a alpha channel texture, it's only a PNG ....... is that what the problem is?

I've been trying to use the alpha channel in world, but for some reason it's just not working for me anymore. No matter what program I use....Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro or Gimp...the alpha channel just won't work for me anymore. I have no clue what I am doing wrong now, but I wish I can fix it. I looked through some of the threads in the forums here about it and tried what they said, but it still won't work for me. The transparent part of the texture is turning out white and thats not how I want it to look in world. lol

If you can find me a alpha channel tutorial that will work for me, then I would love to try it.

Thanks

Delightra

I'm not sure what you mean by "use the alpha channel in world," because everything you do with the alpha channel is done OUTSIDE SL, in Photoshop or Gimp or Paintshop Pro, or whatever.... The more we trade notes, though, the more convinced I am that your problem lies exactly there. It doesn't make any difference whether you create your clothing textures as TGA or PNG files. If they are saved as 32-bit images, then they are carrying transparency information whether you intended them to or not. You may have accidentally saved your PNG file as 32-bit instead of 24-bit and, in the process, stored information in those extra 8 bits per pixel that SL interprets as partial transparency. If so, that would lead to the problem as I described it earlier.

You are wise to turn your attention to learning how to handle the alpha chanel correctly. Even if you decide to continue using PNG as your favorite format instead of TGA, you will have a deeper understanding of transparency if you take that time now. The best tutorial I have seen, hands down, is the one Robin Woods created this past year. It's on her web site at

http://www.robinwood.com/Catalog/Technical/SL-Tuts/SLTutSet.html.

It's clean, it's well-written, and I think you'll find it illuminating. Once you have REALLY studied it carefully, I suggest going back to the Alpha/Transparency sticky at the top of this forum. It's more nuts-and-bolts, aimed at how to create and manage an alpha channel.

This is perfectly normal behavior. The lighting system is additive.

Imagine taking a painting in RL, and shining spotlight on it. It will appear lighter than it would in a dimly lit room.

The same behavior holds true in SL. Start with your base texture, put it in a 3-dimensionally lit scene, and it will appear lighter than when it's just on a 2D canvas in Photoshop.

That said, it's possible Rolig's interpretation is correct. In your screenshot, the lions do appear to be picking up your avatar's skin tone, which suggests that they're translucent, not totally opaque. We can't be totally sure, just from the screenshot alone, but it does look like that might be what's going on.



When you go into appearance mode, an extra light does shine on your avatar, brightening the whole thing. I've always assumed the logic behind this is so you can see what you're doing if you're editing your appearance at night. The important thing is how the garment looks once you've exited appearance mode.

If it's still too light for your liking when you're not in appearance mode, then either darken your source texture in Photoshop, and re-upload it, or else apply a gray tint to the garment in-world.

I'm not sure "light" is the right word, though. Judging by your picture, it's seems it's not that the lions actually look lighter on the av than on the fabric swatch; it's that they look more faint. Unless I'm misinterpreting, it seems to me what you want is for them to look more saturated, more bold, correct?

The faintness suggests that Rolig's hypothesis is correct, and you do indeed have some transparency in there. To know for certain, export your source image to a format that does not support transparency, like BMP, and upload to SL. Apply the new texture to your garment. How do those lions look now? If the coloring is different than before, then you know the problem was transparency. If they look the same, then you know that that wasn't it.

Let us know what you find, and then we can talk more from there to solve the problem.


This is one of the reasons you're better off using a mask-based work-flow (which is what making an alpha channels is) than a WYSIWYG work-flow. When you're going the PNG "simple transparency" route, your eyes can deceive you. It's not always possible to tell just by looking whether a particular area of color is completely opaque, or a little bit transparent.

But if you're using an alpha channel, you can tell instantly. Simply sample the color of that area of the channel, and see if it's pure white or not. If it's anything other than <255, 255, 255>, then you know you've got some transparency in there.

Further, fixing problems with "simple transparency" after the fact can be a nightmare. Depending on how you put the image together, there very likely might not be any efficient way to fix things. Often, the only solution is to start over.

But if your work-flow is mask-based, then it's totally non-destructive. You can change whatever you want, any time you want. If something is transparent that shouldn't be, just paint over that part of the mask (or channel) with white, and it'll become totally opaque.



Sounds like you were saving at the wrong bit depth. To include the alpha channel, you must save the TGA as 32-bit. If it's 24-bit, then by definition, it's only got three channels, not four. And the first three channels will always be the color channels. Transparency is the fourth.



There's about half a dozen of them in the Transparency Guide, stickied at the top of this forum. Follow the directions to the letter, without changing or skipping over anything, and they all work.

Robin's tutorial that Rolig linked is excellent as well.