Need help with transparency, problem driving me insane!

ok heres the setup.


I open a new canvas, set background to trasparent..

Take my pic and copy it onto that canvas..

Cut out the eyes using the lasso tool. which shows the checkboard behind it..

save as targa..


In game the eyeholes that i cut out are transparent but i see these white spots, light shadows that don't show up in photoshop, and nomatter how i cut it, or even pain black around the eyes these damn white pos's keep showing up.



I asked a few people but they couldnt figure out why i had no alpha channel so they couldnt help me...i only have 4 channels and one layer and the backgroun and i'm using photoshop 7...any advice on how to kill those white pieces or do it a different way?

Hunt for Chosen Few's posts in this forum - they're frequent and helpful and contain a step by step guide for making alpha channels. In fact I suspect if you search for Chosen Few, alpha channel and guide you'll get the right one.

You might also need to get the upgrade from Photoshop 7 to 7.0.1.

The quick summary:

You need to make an alpha channel to do the job for you.

Once you've got your eyebrow (or whatever) select the bits you want non-transparent (all of them on all layers). Click over to the channels palette. Add a new channel. It should be black, paint the selected bits white so they show up. (Different levels of grey give you different levels of transparency.) Some versions of PS seem to do this the other way (my old one did, and the new alpha channel was all white) invert the selection and paint the rest black if this happens to you and remember to select the bits you want transparent in future.

The haloing (the extra white bits) you're seeing are an artefact. Best way to avoid it: under your lowest useful layer add a solid black layer (other things work well here - for example a solid layer in the same colour as your darkest colour or background colour, but black works fine for most things. The issue is with how the colour information is mapped as the layers are compressed (which even if you don't merge them they are in a targa) - I'm paraphrasing my understanding and I might be wrong but I think a colour plus a transparent pixel next to each other often gives a pale colour at the edge - that shows up in SL as a white halo around your design. Compressing to black gives a darker version of the colour next to it which works quite well to the eye (although may not for a power blue top for example so it's worth playing with it).

Eloise is right; you have those white bits (commonly referred to as "halos" because you are allowing Photoshop to make the alpha for you, based on the image transparency. This causes any semi-transparent pixels to be blended with white, and gives you the halo.

You need the 7.0.1 patch, so you can make the Alpha using a channel. You can find it here for the Mac, or here for the PC. The one you want is about half-way down the page, in the Version 7.0.1 section, and is called "Adobe Photoshop 7.0.1 Update," released on 8/22/2002.

To make an alpha channel, just hold down command/ctrl and click on the thumbnail in the layer palette. That will load the non-transparent pixels as a selection. Then Save Selection, and you'll have your Alpha. (You don't even need to go look at it, if you don't want to.) If you have more than one layer, hold down the shift key as well, and click on all of them before you Save Selection.

Place a layer with a dark color at the bottom of your layer stack, and the semi-transparent (anti-aliased) pixels will be blended with that, eliminating the halo.

Eloise, you can easily change the display so your transparency is black, and opacity white. On the channel palette, at the top, there's a flippy triangle. Make sure that you have an alpha (it can be blank, but it has to be there,) and choose Channel Options from that menu. (If you don't have an Alpha channel, that option will be grayed out.)

Click the radio button for "Color Indicates: Masked Areas" (instead of "Selected Areas," to return the setting to its default. That's a global change, by the way. All your new images will now show transparency as black, and opacity as white, although your old ones will have to be manually reset if you want them displayed the same way. (Which I recommend, by the way.)

Hope this helps!

oh ok nowonder friends thought i was crazy...i didnt have the right version for what they were doing...i'm pretty sure with the update and your info i can figure things out, thx a bunch