Topic: Photoshop CS, Targa, and alpha channels (Page 1 of 1)

I'm trying to save tga's with alpha from Photoshop CS. The resulting targas have a solid alpha channel, and the colors are replaced with white where they should be transparent. Pixels that used to be full red and half alpha are now light red and full alpha.

How can I fix this so that targas have alpha transparency?

How are your defining your transparency? Layers or are you defining an specfic alpha channel?

When saving targa files you have to generate your own alpha channel, (you are only allowed one) Photoshop CS will not generate it correctly on it's own from layer transparency. If you have a layered doc with transparency you will have to:

A. Flatten it to a single layer with tranparency
B. Generate a selection from the layers transparency using load selection or by CTRL clicking on the layer.
C. Then save that selection a your alpha
D. Flatten the image
E. Save the targa and be sure to choose 32 bit.

J. Stuart J.

What ^he said.

Now, you might also want to fill the Layer so all pixels are 100% opaque. Flaming Pear has 3 flavors of a free plug-in called Solidify that seem to do a decent job.

Scroll down to Free Plugins:
http://www.flamingpear.com/download.html

Thanks! That solidify plugin is something I've wanted for a very long time.

Unfortunately, this is much slower than it was in PS 6, when I could just save the targa and it had the alpha channel. I wish there were a way to do that in one button again.

Double Post

(Edited by jstuartj on 08-26-2006 06:08)

Well you could try reverting back to the old targa plug-in. Not sure if it will work CS2 but might be worth a try. It's downloadable from Adobe's website.

http://www.adobe.com/support/downloads/detail.jsp?ftpID=1544

J. Stuart J.

I had actually tried that. Judging from the file size, it seemed to be the same plugin that I was already using. With either of them, if I saved a transparent image as a targa, and then opened the targa, the result had no transparency.

Slime, I can't remember if you are familiar with C/C++ or not. If you are, would you like your own Filter Meister filter to export? Get everything on one layer, colour and trans/opac info, and hit the filter with a save dialog.

If it's a route you want to try and you do the code, I'm more than willing to compile for you.