Can someone help me with Alpha Channels in PhotoShop Elements

I have been working at this for day's and made little progress. I'm hoping someone can help me with this....Going NUTS

Matthew, I do not believe it supports real alpha channels in TGA files. I tried as well and did a fair amount of web searching before giving up my last straw of hope that Adobe hadn't been so nasty as to remove that feature entirely in order to create a low-end product.

So, since I wasn't willing to shell out for Photoshop (plus was angry at Adobe), I am now a user of Paint Shop Pro 9.

Matt - you might be able to try the trick I use in PS because real Alphas never seem to work for me, and I'm too stubborn to try and figure it out when I have this workaround right here...


Start a new project with a transparent background. Anything you add to the image goes new layers above it.

With judicious use of the eraser, you can remove any unwanted areas in your design layers (white around a shirt, for example, that will leave you just the shirt). Experiment with Layer Opacity for semi-transparency. For things with multiple opacity, like mesh shirts or something, you may have to have more layers, each set to its own particular level of transparency.

Then when you're done, you can just save as a .TAR file. That file format will auto merge the layers for you but leave the transparency intact. No alpha channels involved at all. Just takes a little more time, layers, and patience. (I usually make a backup layer of anything I'm erasing and hide it so if I goof up too bad I can start over again.)


If you're interested, I can email you some .PSD files using this method so you can see better what I'm talking about.

A very nice person turned me on to GIMP. Its a freeware graphics program that supports alpha channels. I uninstalled PS Elements after GIMP came to the rescue.

http://www.gimp.org/

You can also save it as a PNG with transparency information, and use ImageMagick (http://www.imagemagick.org) to convert it to a TGA file. It's a command-line based program, but it's fairly easy: you just use the "convert" program, i.e.

convert texture.png texture.tga

and it gets the transparency right.

I'm glad to see I'm not the only person who tried doing transparency in Photoshop and had troubles. After wasting many a Linden on uploads with whilte backgrounds, I switched to Paintshop Pro. While I like some of the user interface features of PS better, PSP provides a standard way of making alphas that the learn-by-doing-types like me can appreciate.

Edit the pic you want to use in PS.... use eraser or magic wand or whatever, then right click in a area you removed and select inverse.... then do a copy ctrl-C next open a new file as a transparency then paste onto it. ctrl-V.... if you have to clean it more go ahead using the new pic with whats you pasted onto it. then ssimply save it as a tga.... here's a site with a lot of good PS tutorials also

http://www.good-tutorials.com/

WOOT! ty!

My one frustration with PSP is that it crashes ALL the time. (hmmm, eerily like SL 1.5.8.....)