TIFF & Transparency (PS)

home

Hi Home,

I am on a PC (where we cannot export images with transparent background) so I am not sure how much of help I will be until a Mac user chimes in but often it is not indifferent what bitrate you save your image with. If it is a 16 (or maybe even 24) bit image in PS, try to ave it with 32 bit and see if that helps.

Hi Gaieus,

Thanks for the response. I had a play around with the bit settings to no avail. I'm sure the answer is even simpler than that. The fact that when I 'quick look' the file the background is indeed already transparent means the solution is not far!

I just did a search and this guy has explained the problem very plainly:

http://forums.sketchucation.com/viewtopic.php?f=79&t=27330

Thanks again.

thomthom

Have you tried the format PNG? It's transparency channel is visible in PS.
TIFF transparency is a bit different. It's like having a regular RGB with an alpha layer embedded.

home

@thomthom said:

Have you tried the format PNG? It's transparency channel is visible in PS.
TIFF transparency is a bit different. It's like having a regular RGB with an alpha layer embedded.

Hey thomthom,

Thanks for the response. Yes, PNG works as desired. However, I'm still keen to get this working with the TIFF as I know it's doable.

Could you be so kind as to provide a step-by-step?

Just noticed the photo-match tutorial from The Sketchup School shows a TIFF being exported then imported into PS directly with the background transparent..

thomthom

I work with SU on PC - so I'm not familiar with how it works.
And I never use TIFF - because I'd had the same problems before where the alpha informations appears as a separate channel - which I find awkward to work with.

So I just stick with PNG... sorry.

home

Thanks again, guys.

That process looks more complicated than it needs to be, James.

Anyway, I found a workaround (or maybe this is the process)..

Open the TIFF, select channels, apple-click the alpha channel (which selects all of the non-transparent pixels) then copy-paste into a new doc.

I'm sure it should be easier than this. I'd like to think it would just load into PS directly with transparency (and according to the youtube posted above, it does.. or at least it did).

If any mac/SU experts care to chime in, I'd still appreciate it. In the meantime, I hope that helps anyone who was wondering.

thomthom

I'm curious why you need to use the TIFF format?

home

It's for print. TIFF is the golden-standard in lossless format, no?

Outside of that, not really sure.. I've just always used TIFF (over JPEG) for important images.

Gaieus

Over jpg(which has a lossy compression and no alpha transparency) it is okay. But png's compress losslessly and DO have transparency so a png should perfectly do the job with a much smaller file size and apparently with less hassle.

home

Sure, seems like PNG isn't a bad option, then.

Still, I should be able to do this in TIFF if I want to.

Gaieus

Well, as I first wrote, this is where I am stumped as it's a Mac only feature so I have never been able to play around with it and don1t know what the trick are.