I've been trying to create custom portraits, but I've run into a problem with Photoshop... hoping someone here can tell me what I'm doing wrong. I've created the pic, added an alpha channel, and tried to save... but when I choose .tga format, Photoshop refuses to save the alpha channel. Also, I've noticed when I loaded the 'smiley' example .tga into Photoshop, there doesn't appear to be an alpha channel... rather it seems that the blue channel is actually the alpha. Anyone able to offer some advice on this?
Why would you need an alpha channel for the portraits anyway? I don't recall seeing transparency on them anywhere in-game
When i open up the _BIG smiley face example, i see 4 channels under RGB: red/gree/blue/alpha. The blue channel is all black and the alpha channel is all white. *shrug*. When you hit "save as" is there a checkbox under save options for "Save:"->"Alpha Channels"? What version of photoshop are you using?
When I open up the smiley, I get 4 channels: rgb, red, green, blue. Blue channel is all black. When I try to save, the alpha channel is marked... however, as soon as I switch to .tga file format, the alpha channel unchecks, and a warning icon appears beside it saying it must be saved as a copy or something... saving as a copy does nothing however. I'm using Photoshop 7.0, currently up to date afaik. I hope I can get this solved, I have a dozen or so portraits based on Luis Royo art I'd like to put up. Edit: spelling
The blue channel is all black because the background of the image is yellow, so dont worry about that how i got it to work is that i picked the alfa channel and selected all (ctrl + a) and cleared all (backspace) dont forget to flatten the image too. hope it helps. edit: if there isn't a alfa channel just make one by by choose "new channel" under the black arrow. The alfa are going to be black... so just do as i said above. edit2: I just reread your original post more carefull ... and the only thing I can come up with is that you haven't flatten the image? and you must save it in 32 bit for the alfa to work
Besides being a coder, I also happen to be ACE: Photoshop. That is, Adobe Certified Expert: Photoshop. Go browse the Ataricommunity forums, the Custom Portrait Sticky THread... look for my posts, after page 6 or so, I started posting step-throughs on make/saving custom portraits Briefly: The best way to do this, is open an existing portrait (or make a copy of it, and work with the copy). This way, all you have to do is Copy the image you want to make a new portrait (after resizing), and paste it into the pre-made portrait, overwriting the existing image. Everything is already set, and all you do is "Save As..." (CTRL+SHFT+S). It sounds like you're working in Indexed Color mode, when you need to be working in RGB mode Check out the other forums, and if you have any more questions after reading there, drop me a line here
Balboa: I followed your directions and it worked, oddly enough. Photoshop still refuses to show the alpha channels though, so I won't be able to copy the alphas with the border onto my portraits. Maybe I'm missing a plugin or something. In any case, the first Royo portrait is done, fitting for a human female barbarian. You can get it here if you want to take a look: http://members.rogers.com/steelwraith/files/royo_portrait_1.rar Thanks for the help.
