Ok..Jpeg format doesn't work for a decal..when I set the key color to what I want, little blotches of that color still are there because the picture isn't high quality...what should I do about a decal..my program can export to Targa (except when I try that the decal for some reason cannot be seen in A:M), TIFF, JPG, GIF, BMP, EPS, PCX, and PICT..I think there are some more, but not off the top of my head...please help

Others may chime in with there prefered format, but TGA's seem to be the best ussually. They also support alpha for transparency (if you image software does), which means you don't use a key color. Using a key color requires a bit more work to not get artifacts or else you need to limit your color palette some what so as not to use the key color in portions that shoould be visible.

I've just tried bitmap and it works fine..I just posted this to see others' opinions..I really want to use alpha channel, but my program doesn't have that feature...I have Adobe Photo Deluxe..it's like a level down from Photo shop

If you don't have software capable of Alpha TGA's, you might try The Gimp. I played with it and it seems to be stable. If you're interested, do a search for GIMP. There's been a number of post about it, where to get it and some discussion on versions.

is that the one that's free?

yup, free as in speech AND free as in beer.

www.gimp.org

http://www.gimp.org/windows/

If you find Gimp OK to use, then definitely go for it.

Because the inteface is organised differently from traditional Windows packages, it can take a while to get comfortable with it. You will find that in spite to the potential power of Gimp, many people prefer to pay a fortune for Adobe Photoshop licenses.

One other secret gem is to pick up any Corel Draw graphics suite from V7 onwards. v7 is often available very cheaply and it is still more robust, faster and more professional then 95% of current commercial bitmap-graphics packages. And in the one suite, you get Photopaint (a true competitor to Adobe Photoshop), Corel Draw (like Adobe illustrator - a vector package) and Corel Trace (converting scanned bitmap images into vectors). Corel packages include a proper macro language and it is easy to use it to apply a set of changes to multiple frames (like a render output) automatically. I have seen OEM Corel Draw v7 suite licenses for US$5 to $25.

The other thing to watch out for is the free Cinepaint ( a derivative of Gimp). Currently, they do not have a robust Windows version, but a current project to change over to the fltk graphics package from the buggy GTK+ should see a new Windows release out sometime in 2005. If you have a linux or MAC OSX system, the current V0.18.3 is pretty good.

Cinepaint is very promising because:

1. It is designed to edit multiframe sequences
2. You can edit at 16 bitcolour resolution or up to 32 bit floating point resolution (per colour channel). Gimp and most other current graphics packages cannot do any better then 8 bits per colour channel.
3. In post rendering clean-up work, you can clone from one frame to another. Very useful !

Richard Harrowell.

and...If you're extremely daring, there is this too:

http://www.eecs.wsu.edu/paint.net/

...as seen on Slashdot....as produced by a university near me, but I haven't touched it with a 10 foot pole.

Everytime I ask one of our software developers to explain to me the usefulness of and/or what ".net" can do for me, I get about the same response as I would hear from the Queen of Hearts regarding marketing...

http://www.textfiles.com/humor/COMPUTER/alice.jok

I'd suggest reading the Alice in DIGITALand joke before trying paint.net, I hear that paint.net is excruciatingly slow.


eric

p.s. my user pic collage is 100% made with GIMP, although I remember having trouble trying to find certain tools...probably just newbieism on my part.