Ive got photoshop CS3 and can't seem to find anyway to do this. Ive got a bunch of sprites for various effects that are in gray scale. White is meant to be fully solid and black fully transparent. The problem is I can only do transparency either by a single colour key(which leaves a black edge areound the edges of the sprite) or by alpha layer in my program... The problem is I can't seem to find a way to "copy" the red channel onto the alpha channel so that I can then make the entire thing solid white with the bits that used to be non-white partialy transparent... not sure I descibe this so well so here an example of what I have(a.bmp) and what I'm trying to convert it into(b.png): DOWNLOAD

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Original post by Sync Views The problem is I can't seem to find a way to "copy" the red channel onto the alpha channel so that I can then make the entire thing solid white with the bits that used to be non-white partialy transparent...

1.) Select Image.
2.)Make sure the channels window/tab is available, usually it is grouped beside the layer window.
3.)Under the channels window, one by one, turn off the green channel, the blue channel, leaving only the red channel.
4.)Make sure you have the red channel selected. Select All (Ctrl+A). Then, copy (Ctrl+C).
5.) Create the alpha channel if it doesn't already exist.
6.) With the alpha channel selected, paste (Ctrl+V).

Though, your main problem may be the blending that occurs with the brush, I.e. not all pixels are 100% black or 100% white to work with your non-blending color keying. If so, then you can turnoff brush blending and/or increase the contrast of the grayscale map in the alpha channel until you have all pixels 100% white/black, and edit it from there.

Thanks that worked :)

PNG supports natural transparency. To create a Transparent PNG you just create your canvas with no background color, then use photoshops transparency slider to adjust an image.

TGA is my personal favorite for alpha masked transparency. It's much smaller in file size than a PNG, but still excellent quality when loaded onto a 16bit surface.