No, it is not possible.
No, we’re not even considering something like that.
If you want full transparency – use an RGB image with transparency. If you want to convert the color portion to indexed color later, you can do that (and split out the transparency).
But editing something as limited as indexed color with full transparency – that just doesn’t make sense.
Please don’t be so quick to judge that this "just doesn’t make sense". It certainly does make sense for your customers who are game developers.
Modern graphics hardware (including PC cards, the Xbox, the GameCube and the Playstation2) all support these indexed-with-alpha images as textures. In the specific case of the PS2, it is probably the most useful and efficient format of all, and the one we most want to use.
We have custom file format plugins that will output image files for each hardware platform, but we rely on Photoshop for things that it’s good at and we’re not, like color-reduction of images.
Since we cannot use Photoshop to create this particular type of images, we spend thousands of dollars on copies of your competitors’ products because we have no other choice. But we would rather use Photoshop, because we otherwise like your program the best!
Chris – I’ve heard it before, and it still doesn’t make sense.
You can convert to indexed color as a post process (even using Photoshop).
What products actually support this?
Chris-
The program that we currently use to perform this conversion is OPTPiX iMageStudio. It will happily take a 4-channel RGBA image and convert it into a one-channel indexed image where the color palette is RGBA.
If, as you say, Photoshop can already do this, then please tell me how! That would be the best possible outcome because we would much prefer to work entirely in Photoshop.
If indeed this is not supported, it would be worth your while to consider adding support. Photoshop is largely the standard in the game development industry, and every company that I know of has to deal with this same issue.
Thanks,
Chris
Make an RGB image with transparency, save off the transparency channel, flatten with desired matting color, convert the resulting image to indexed color, save the indexed color image.
Now you have an indexed color image, and a transparency image.
This is trivial to script using actions, JavaScript, etc.
Yes, but that process is no good when targeting graphics hardware. As I said, the whole point is to have one single channel image with an RGBA palette, not two images or two channels.
I guess that we will have to continue using our other software. I’m sorry that you guys don’t recognize the need for this.
Thanks,
Chris
No, Photoshop is not going to do an RGBA palettized image editing. There are export plugins to do that.
If you tell us what file formats you need, we could add it as an export plugin, or to SaveForWeb.
What existing export plugins will do that?
I would be happy if you guys added export plugins for TM2 (the PS2 format), TPL (the GameCube format), and DDS (the Xbox format).
But they are not simple image formats, there are lots of hardware considerations (like swizzling, mip-mapping, etc.) that you will need to consider if you write those exporters yourself. In addition, it often is necessary in game development to tweak image file formats to contain extra information.
If direct support for this format won’t be added to Photoshop, then the best solution I could suggest would be for you guys to create a plugin that could do palettized RGBA output, and to make the source code for that available so that we can adapt it for our own needs.
Thanks again!
Chris – ok, point me to documentation on those file formats and I’ll see what I can do. And those are actually easy issues for an image file format. I’ve had to handle a lot worse.
Sure, I could create a simple, documented palettized file that other utilities could read — but if there is an existing format that I could use, that would be preferred (and PNG is the only one I know that supports that notion).
What email address can I use to reach you? Let’s take this offline.
clicking on chris’ name give info chris…
"Please send Photoshop related email to , but don’t abuse it"
hth, good luck,
dave
