Separate Alpha Channel File Types

< Previous | Contents | Manuals Home | Boris FX | Next >

‌Separate Alpha Channel File Types

Alpha channel files are themselves black and white files: their own alpha channel is ignored and should be omitted. Ideally they can be monochrome images.

Since SynthEyes is intended for processing RGB imagery, support for reading gray-scale formats is very limited (currently PNG or TIFF). You can write an alpha channel as RGB if necessary (many apps won't give you a monochrome output option). SynthEyes will use the green channel of an RGB image for alpha.

Alpha channels have a lot of redundancy, so you want to make sure that the format do a good job compressing the alpha channel, without introducing artifacts. Run- length or ZIP compression are good choices (not JPEG!). Due to compression, an RGB image will probably not be much larger than a gray-scale image.

For most usage, PNG is the recommended alpha-file format.

< Previous | Contents | Manuals Home | Boris FX | Next >